Venetian Blind (novel)

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Revision as of 16:44, 30 September 2020 by imported>Hayford Peirce (rewrote the lede -- its really not a standard suspense novel)
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William Haggard on the back cover of The Conspirators, 1967
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Venetian Blind is a 1959 suspense novel by the British author William Haggard published in England by Cassell and in the United States by Ives Washburn. It was Haggard's second of 21 books involving his protagonist Colonel Charles Russell, the head of the unobtrusive but lethal Security Executive, a government counter-intelligence agency. Like many of Haggard's books it has both standard elements of suspense and an almost Henry Jamiesian exposition of British Establishment mores and character, in both the government and upper-class financiers, scientists, industrialists, and their families.

Plot

Protagonist is perhaps too strong a word to describe Colonel Russell. As Haggard himself wrote about his fiction:

My novels are chiefly novels of suspense with a background of international politics. A Colonel Charles Russell of the Security Executive, a not entirely imaginary British counter-espionage organization, while not a protagonist in the technical sense, holds the story line together in the background by his operations, while the characters in the foreground carry the action."[1]

References

  1. From the back flap of the dust jacket of the Walker and Company American edition of The Conspirators, New York, 1967