The Ninth Directive

"This is much more of an action adventure thriller. It’s part of a series of books by a guy called Elleston Trevor, who wrote The Flight of the Phoenix, which was made into a famous film. But then under the pseudonym Adam Hall he wrote 19 of these novels. I think it’s criminally forgotten, this series. I’ve read all of them, yes. The 19th one came out after he died, and it had a very short print run, and I spent ages and ages looking for it. I finally found one in a bookshop in Antwerp, for 3€, and I very calmly went up to the counter and bought it. Meanwhile it was going for more like 1,000€ on eBay. So I got very into the series. The main character, Quiller, is a sort of James Bond character, but he’s also a complete mess: he’s completely neurotic and paranoid. If you haven’t read them before and like the Bourne films with Matt Damon, or even the new Daniel Craig-type James Bond films, they’re really that kind of thing – nail-biting, white-knuckle rides. They’re all told from his point of view, they’re all first-person narratives, so you’re really inside his head. “The 19th one came out after he died, and it had a very short print run, and I spent ages and ages looking for it. I finally found one in a bookshop in Antwerp, for 3€, and I very calmly went up to the counter and bought it. Meanwhile it was going for more like 1,000€ on eBay.” I think The Ninth Directive is my favourite of the series – he has to go to Bangkok and the basic set-up is that someone is going to assassinate Prince Philip on a visit there. They don’t say it’s Prince Philip, but it is. The agent’s mission is to figure out who is going to assassinate Prince Philip, who is always referred to as ‘the Person’ and then assassinate that assassin before he manages to carry out his mission. It was written five years before The Day of the Jackal, but it’s very much the same kind of forensic analysis of a secret mission that’s incredibly convincing and keeps you on the edge of your seat."