The Private Sector

Preface to the 2014 Edition

Originally published in 1971, The Private Sector is the first in a series by Joseph Hone, who I regard as one of the great spy novelists of the twentieth century. In the last few decades Hone’s standing in the field has been somewhat eclipsed by the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton, but in his day he was widely seen as their equal. Newsweek featured a full-page review of this book, and hailed it as the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin.

The idiosyncrasies of public taste are often unfathomable, but I sometimes wonder if more people don’t know of Hone’s work simply because it was neither fish nor fowl in the genre — rather, a less easily marketed combination. Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: ‘Field’ and ‘Desk’. James Bond is a field agent — we follow his adventures, not those of his superior M. In John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, the focus tends to be on those back at headquarters — George Smiley is a senior officer at the Circus (he later, briefly, becomes head of it).

I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I’m reading were as deft at characterisation and prose style as it is at the suspense. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It’s all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder for ever? In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: my character Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by Hone, who combined both camps in a way that leaves me breathless — and sick with envy.

Before I was a published novelist I interviewed Mr Hone about his work, and afterwards he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I’m conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. But here were long reviews of Hone’s work from Time, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post and other august publications, comparing him favourably with le Carré, Deighton, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Better still, the books live up to the praise.

Hone’s protagonist — ‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself — is British intelligence officer Peter Marlow. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, femmes fatales, high-octane action, Machiavellian villains — all the great spy stuff you’d want. But it’s wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterisation so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you’ve just read a great work of literature.

Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others’ lives, meddling where he shouldn’t, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He’s a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic — he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.

In The Private Sector, we meet him as an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. It’s one of those ‘innocents in too deep’ stories, but the evocation of both Egypt and the shifting loyalties of the protagonists are dazzling. Hone alternates between third and first persons, which he makes look like the easiest thing in the world. Set in part in the run-up to the Six Day War, it is superficially about Soviet moles, as much British spy fiction of this era was, but the subtext is about how we can never know anyone else. That’s a feeble attempt to describe the novel’s complexity, though, so here’s L. J. Davis writing about it in the Washington Post in July 1972 instead:

There are moments in this book — indeed, whole chapters — where one is haunted by the eerie feeling that Joseph Hone is really Graham Greene, with faint quarterings of Lawrence Durrell and Thomas Pynchon. His tone is nearly perfect — quiet, morbidly ironic, beautifully controlled and sustained, moodily introspective, occasionally humorous and more often bitter, with a persistent undertone of unspeakable sadness and irrecoverable loss.

Hone went on to write three further Marlow novels — The Sixth Directorate, The Flowers of the Forest (published as The Oxford Gambit in the US) and The Valley of the Fox — as well as a standalone spy thriller, The Paris Trap. All of these novels have now been reissued in Faber Finds. All of them are packed with beautiful writing, astute psychological insight and pace: Hone never forgot he was writing thrillers. It’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that makes Hone so special — makes him, I think, one of the greats.

Jeremy Duns

Jeremy Duns is the author of the Paul Dark novels Free Agent (2009), Free Country (a.k.a. Song of Treason, 2010) and The Moscow Option (2012), and also the non-fiction Dead Drop (2013).