All queries answered about spy stories

Press, 10 April 1979, Page 11

All queries answered about spy stories

If you are in doubt about the world’s leading writers in the field of spy stories, your problems can now be solved by the book: “Who’s Who in Spy Fiction.” 8.8. C. “World of Books”

(Concert Radio tonight) interviews Donald McCormick, who has compiled this compendium of spy writers from Fennimore Cooper to Len Deighton. The spy novel in English dates from the 19205, but the Chinese were dabbling in the literature of espionage at least 2000 years ago.

Still on the subject of fictional spies, the programme looks at John Gardner whose spy novels have become progressively more serious with the years, culminating in his latest book, “The Nostradamus Traitor.”

The story is based on the fact that during World War II Hitler’s Information Minister, Goebbels,

used prophecies from the sixteenth-century prophet Nostradamus as proof of the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. Finally the 8.8. C. talks to Denis Herbstein, a journalist recently expelled from South Africa, who has written a book about

the country dating from the time of the Soweto riots. His book, “White Man we Want to Talk to You,” challenges many ideas, among them the idea that the black African has a limited grasp of political events in South Africa.