Yesterday's Spy

Cover designer’s note

As one of the key themes at the heart of Yesterday’s Spy is identity, I decided that a masked, anonymous German soldier would dominate the cover. That he appears German, from his uniform and the official stamp is not in doubt — but his identity is hidden, and by extension his true allegiance. The disguising black panel offered a neat frame in which to sit the title of the book, which I have reproduced in a typewriter font that would have been commonplace during the war.

On each front cover of this latest quartet, I have placed a photograph of the eyes of the bespectacled unnamed spy, in this instance superimposed with an oscillograph to represent audio surveillance, which would have been one of the many weapons in the arsenal of the Guernica network. The fact that I have reversed the image is a further nod to the switching of sides carried out by double-agents.

Readers who have been faithfully building their collection of these reissues will by now have become familiar with my use of a linking motif on the spines of the books. Being the final foursome in the entire series of reissues, and books in which violence is never too far away, I thought it a good idea to ‘go out with a bang’, as it were. This quartet’s spines accordingly display a different handgun, as mentioned in each of the books’ texts. The example here is a Luger ‘Parabellum’, a well-known German sidearm that was popular with all branches of their military but would have fallen out of use by the time of this story. Its appearance here is to reinforce the idea that ‘yesterday’s spy’ was in action during a time that pre-dates the action in this book.

Another recurring feature in this quartet, to be found within each back cover’s photographic montage, is a pair of ‘our hero’s’ glasses, which look suspiciously like those worn by ‘Harry Palmer’ in The Ipcress File and other outings…

A small collection of postcards reflect the various locations that the story takes us: from London to Vichy France to Egypt, as Charlie sets out to track down Steve Champion. A luggage label from the Cairo Hilton Hotel, a British Intelligence Corps, cap badge, plus a souvenir medallion commemorating the 1929 ‘Around the World’ flight of the Graf Zeppelin offer clues to the history of the elusive Mr Champion, and all these objects sit on a coded silk handkerchief. What is the message contained within the handkerchief? Well, that’s a secret…

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

Hollywood 2012