Yesterday’s Enemy, by William Haggard (Walker, 204 pp., $2.95, paper). “Had he swung right round without even suspecting it, did he now think of orthodox disciplined Communism as the savior of a decadent Europe? No, not quite that, it was much more negative. . . . The disease of a degenerate nation was something called egalitarian socialism. Which hard-line Communism destroyed at sight. Russell, at the lowest, mistrusted it.” Not the kind of digression you expect to run across in a two-hundred-page spy thriller? Then meet Colonel Charles Russell, the old-fashioned hero of some two dozen superb books by William Haggard, a retired British civil servant who took up writing in 1958 (at the age of 51) and who has since produced the most elegant and durable series of political suspense novels currently in existence. Lately the head of a shadowy CIA-type operation called the Security Executive, the aristocratic, worldly Colonel Russell now lives in uneasy retirement, judging the actions of his floundering successors by the ruthless standards of Realpolitik, viewing ’the world with the steady eye of a man of the Right, and occasionally finding himself swept back into the life of action by circumstances beyond his control. Mr. Haggard chronicles the periodic adventures of this marvelous senior citizen in a lean prose style that fairly bristles with outraged intelligence—his books read like a cross between John Buchan and Malcolm Muggeridge—and one can only assume that it is his shameless, unfashionable elitism which has kept Colonel Russell from becoming the James Bond of the egghead set. William Haggard’s books, sad to say, have been poorly distributed in this country for over two decades; but Walker and Company, Mr. Haggard’s American publishers, have now put Colonel Russell in paperback at last. Their first title, Yesterday’s Enemy, is a chilly tale of attempted nuclear skulduggery that dates from 1976. Though not one of Mr. Haggard’s very best books, it still serves as a more than adequate reminder that no one since Somerset Maugham has written about the spy trade with anything like William Haggard’s blend of realism and urbanity.
TERRY TEACHOUT
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