You read Quiller & everything else pales in comparison. James Bond is embarrassing & LeCarre's characters are boring bureacurats. Quiller however is resourceful, brave & vulnerable at the same time. He doesn't need gadgets or even a gun, he is better, stronger & braver than most of us, but the plot & his actions still remain credible. He's also human: he doesn't hide his fear of going back "to those nasty birds", nor the fact that while determined to die, he'd rather avoid it. You never get the sense when reading that it's a character you can't relate to.

In this adventure, Quiller is first challenged to define his own objective. The geography is real; you can feel the heat and see the shifting sand and share his thirst. You also share his satisfaction when he succeeds - and then his determination when he is sent back to die.

From his induction by Loman into a suicide mission to the end its self-prophesying ending Adam Hall delivers quintissential Quiller dialogue and attitude; at his most innovative and closer that ever before to the edge, the hard-nosed espion comes home with reputation enhanced.

Quiller, the shadow executive for a British undercover agency is sent on a mission to Berlin that requires him to uncover the plans of Phoenix, a Nazi group. Quiller is beaten and battered but finally uncovers several planned exercises in terror. The novel is a synthesis of a James Bond novel with the best of Len Deighton. There is plenty of action for the Bond fan, but taut believable plots for the more serious spy aficionado. No supervillains, but a shadowy ominous realistic group of villains. Quiller Memorandum gives you the best of both worlds.

When it was first published as The Berlin Memorandum in 1966, this novel won Elleston Trevor the Edgar Award for mystery fiction. Trevor, whose other literary credits include The Flight of the Phoenix and Bury Him Among Kings, was spurred by his success to write a nineteen-book series about Quiller's further missions under the pseudonym of Adam Hall. Although the books have had a loyal following, especially in Britain, none has received the acclaim which greeted this first novel in the series. A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it was eventually filmed as The Quiller Memorandum with George Segal and Alec Guiness. Quiller is a "shadow executive" for an officially unavowed British intelligence agency known only as "the Bureau". The novel opens in post-war Berlin where he has been working with the Z police, a German agency devoted to the prosecution of war criminals. War-weary from an undercover assignment at a concentration camp during WW II, Quiller is due to return home. The Bureau convinces him to stay, however, by revealing to him that a forming neo-Nazi movement in Berlin may be headed by Zossen, the commandant of the concentration camp from which Quiller had helped Jews escape. Working alone in a faceless city which presents hidden threats at every turn, Quiller accepts the assigment that has already left one agent dead -- stepping into, as his field director puts it, a gap between two mobilizing armies which cannot see one another in the fog. Hall's writing is consistently terse and compelling. He is at his best in evoking the tension of working for a manipulative secret beaurocracy whose motivations remain obscure, but whose local culture seems vitally real and believable. Quiller is a soldier at work for an army that he knows only from the ranks, whose generals are shrouded in shadow. It is in evoking this culture that Hall's writing transcends the genre, exploring complex themes of loyalty and disillusionment, and the specifically 20th century Kafka-esque relationship of an individual to the beaurocracies that determine his fate. But the real strength of the novel lies in its pure ability to entertain. Hall manages to maintain a level of tension and suspense worthy of comparison to any of espionage fiction's masterpieces, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to The Ipcress File. If some of the writing now seems cliche, that is because to a large extent THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM created the cliches. It has had hundreds of imitators both in print an on the screen since its publication, but anyone going back to the original (even thirty years later) will likely agree with the New York Times Book Review that "no one writes better espionage than Adam Hall."

Probably the best (but certainly one of the best) in Hall's Quiller-series. It tackles a number of issues & just in the right proportion. We learn the most about Quiller, his personality, sense of honour from this book: the scene in Lyublyanka is quite enlightening. The agent who's ready to die for the Bureau, but kills for his sense of pride; and who wouldn't betray his word to his (ex)-friend not even to save his own life. The perfect mixture of adventure, plot and the tackling of existential questions.

I must declare an interest: This book is dedicated to me. It's the eighth of 19 brilliant escapades starring the lean and mean Quiller, about whom reviewers have observed, "the ultimate pro, cynical, hard and master of the double-think ... businesslike, low-keyed, nondescript."

An Englishman, Adam Hall - real name Elleston Trevor - died at his Arizona home in 1996, one day after completing "Quiller Balalaika", scandalously still not taken up by an American publisher. However, the In Memoriam tributes from writers and reviewers around the world set in motion reprints of all his earlier works, including those under his various noms-de-plume (many of which have been misleadingly rejacketed as Adam Hall titles, thus giving the impression of a post-humous cache of new Quillers).

"The Scorpion Signal" is Hall at his tense and entertaining best, opening with Q in foul mood with his employers and actually turning down the mission before the full gravity of the situation sinks in: A fellow agent - another top executive in the field - has been put through interrogation at Lubyanka, escaped, and been *re-captured*. And he knows everything about one of British intelligence's most valuable Moscow-based cells, enough to blow the agency sky high. Quiller's job: To get into the KGB fortress and out again with his target intact. Only Adam Hall could conceive such a suicidally improbable mission for his man and succeed so convincingly. Even with the change of political climate and the demise of that whole genre of cold war thrillers, the Quiller canon continue to crackle on the page for their sheet storytelling excitement and what one reviewer spotted as Hall's "scholar's way of relishing the finer points of his discipline for their own sake." One of the doyens of this trade is no longer with us but his hero lives on to keep new readers on the edge of their seats and to show newcomers how it's really done. If you don't know Q, start with the equally capable "Quiller Memorandum" and work up, and I envy you the pleasures in store.

I've always loved the more literary espionage novels, like those written by John Le Carre or Graham Greene; but for more purely escapist reading, I've enjoyed few books as much as Adam Hall's Quiller novels. Of these, "The Peking Target," remains a personal favorite (esp. since I was studying karate when I first read it). Few authors do as good a job of entering into, and involving the reader in the borderline insanity of an action hero's mind. Even fewer did a comparable job of describing a hand-to-hand fight scene from that same perspective (Quiller never used a gun, and both the author and character were long-time karateka). Adam Hall's Quiller books were really great fun and I'd love to see them back in print some day. If you like straight ahead action with a degree of psychological depth, try a Quiller novel (if you can find one) try it (and remember to tell me where you got it).

The first movie tie-in that I can recall reading was a Star Wars novelization in Spring of '76, before any of us had even really heard about the
movie. At first I just assumed that the George Lucas had based his film on the book, but it gradually dawned that, to the contrary, the screenplay had been the source of a quickie book. (As I recall, the book is credited to Lucas, but I think Alan Dean Foster actually wrote it.) It seemed sort of like a rip-off to me even at an early age and I've been suspicious of books that are also movies ever since. So when I found this one, with scenes from the fine Jimmy Stewart film on the cover and a big movie announcement on the back, I looked it over carefully to make sure that the book had come first. Imagine my surprise when a little research turned up the fact that not only was Elleston Trevor a well regarded author, but he was also the writer known as Adam Hall, who wrote the Quiller series of spy novels, the first of which, The Quiller Memorandum, was voted the 1965 Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Indeed, Elleston Trevor turns out to be a synonym too, for an Englishman, born Trevor Dudley Smith.

In Flight of the Phoenix, Elleston Trevor (for that was what he had his name legally changed to) gives us a harrowing tale of survival against the elements and human frailties in the Saharan desert. Fourteen men and a monkey, returning from the Libyan oilfields, live through a plane crash, but are left without food, water, or a radio, and because a sandstorm had blown them off course, no one is looking for them. The pilot, Frank Towns, is so caught up in justifiably blaming himself that he is nearly ready to give up. But his navigator, Lew Moran, coaxes him towards survival and mediates between the rest of the group and Stringer, a young, arrogant, and hypersensitive engineer who has figured out a way to cobble together a jerry-rigged smaller plane from the wreckage of the original. Stringer, though unbearably officious, is in all likelihood their only way out, if Moran can keep him from storming off in a fit of pique and keep the others from killing him.

Also among the survivors are Trucker Cobb, a chief driller being sent home from the fields because he's begun to lose his mind and Captain Harris, a gung-ho, by-the-book, British officer and several of his less enthusiastic men. There's also Roberts, who, in a gesture of insane but touching tenderness is giving his water ration to the monkey. Together they form an ill-matched group and as thirst, starvation, exposure, madness, and desperation turn up the torque, social order and morality and simple human decency are shunted aside and the men begin to turn on one another. The only thing that gives them some sense of purpose is the slender possibility that Stringer will somehow manage to salvage a workable plane and that Towns will get it together enough to fly them out.

Mr. Trevor keeps the action moving, but doesn't hesitate to draw out the tension, particularly between Stringer and Towns, the two men who are the equally important keys to survival, but who end up vying for authority over the group. This adds an element of Lord of the Flies to what would be a decent enough action yarn anyway. In this case at least, though the movie is now better remembered, the book holds up well as an exciting piece of fiction in its own right.

GRADE : B+

I read this book when I was in High School, I'm 44 now, and I still remember the last line in the book, "Out of the desert walked seven men and a monkey." I'm currently searching for this book and will pay a good price for it. If you have not read this, read it. Its also been made into a movie, starring James Stewart! 1965

Agreed with the previous one in general. I think the beginning, the idea that they wanna sack him & the way they coax him into this new mission are actually more interesting than the execution of the mission itself. And it's indeed a pity the reference to the other mission that led to the murder he committed for the girl in Prague isn't among the other stories: for awhile I kept looking for it. Especially a pity, because many references are indeed linked. However, later in Quiller Salamander there'll be a reference to the episode when Quiller killed "for his own reasons".

Not the greatest of the Quiller series but certainly something different. Quiller, facing the sack as a result of exposing the Bureau to hazard finds himself in a Russian MIG, exposed to a Bureau double-agent and facing the wrath of Ferris as the price for his re-admission to the Bureau. My only real criticism of the book is that some of the 'threads' into other (unwritten) stories are not explored and look like they never will be. Quiller saves the day but as usual winds up smelling like something from the local garbage dump. Really enjoyed the opening of this one!