The Riddle of the Sands Adventure Club

One of my favorite podcasts of recent years was something called "The Riddle of the Sands Adventure Club." Hosted by Lloyd Shepherd and Tim Wright, the podcast and accompanying website did a deep dive into The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, a book that is arguably the first modern spy novel and what I …

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Best of 2017

Last year I put together a short list of some of my favorite things from the past year. I’ve done it again and here they are in no particular order - A Divided Spy by Charles Cumming - This one is a little selfish. I won a auction to have my name appear in the …

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The International Spy Museum – A Review

This past summer I was able to take a road trip to Washington D.C. and while there visited the International Spy Museum. Open since 2002, it's one of the few museums dedicated to espionage. It's set to move to a new, bigger location in early 2018 so this is a last look at the museum's …

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Spy Tours of London

If you are a spy fan and you are in London, odds are you will want to take a spy tour. I was able to take advantage of many of the ones I found during my recent trip there and wanted to offer a list of the various options. I didn't take a bad one, …

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A fictional spy walk in London

Following up on my previous post about locations in London made famous by John le Carré as haunts of George Smiley, I'm posting some other spots where fictional spies hung out. You can find all of these and more on my fictional spies Google map. Update: Author Mick Herron has confirmed via email that this …

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Mr. Smiley’s Neighborhood

Many a tour guide has made a significant amount of money holding Sherlock Holmes or Dickens character tours in London looking at the real locations of their fictional counterparts. Some would consider this foolish. Why look at place that these characters never walked? They weren't real people after all. That's true, but visiting these places …

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