March 31, 1990
This complex, layered tale of espionage pits members of the CIA against one another in an effort to stop an information leak concerning the construction and deployment of atomic devices. In Washington, Rear Admiral J. Pepper Toothacher is recalled from disgraced retirement to ``walk back the cat''--that is, trace the leak. He is joined by the brilliant but physically repulsive Wanamaker and a mathematical genius-cum-chauffeur named Huxstep. In New York, Silas Sibley, aka the Weeder, also engaged in secret work for the company, tracks phone calls across the nation from his SoHo loft and--in his spare time--indulges a passion for Revolutionary War heroes, particularly one legendary figure he coyly refers to as ``Nate.'' When Toothacher's operation closes in on the leak, the Weeder's world is abruptly shut down, and he, with his erratic but appealing sidekick Snow, takes flight--for reasons he shares with Nate. Littel blends history and espionage inventively, and his dialogue and prose resound with high wit. But the story remains obtuse, the historical subplot something of a giveaway. The result is funny and complex but a little silly. 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo.
February 10, 2003
Two more of Robert Littell's vintage spy novels are back in print. Set soon after the Cuban missile crisis, Littell's 1986 novel The Sisters has CIA operatives Francis and Carroll (affectionately known to their colleagues as "the sisters of Night and Death") manipulating the KGB's smartest agents as if they're so many puppets. They get "the Potter," former head of the KGB's sleeper agent school, to betray his best prot g , "the Sleeper," sending the Potter on a cross-continent trek to rescue his student with the help of the Sleeper's ex-lover, a mortuary hair stylist. In The Once and Future Spy, originally published in 1990, the CIA plans to discredit the Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980s by blowing up the University of Tehran. The mission is threatened when a rogue operative, a proto-computer hacker obsessed with the Revolutionary War traitor Nathan Hale, gets wind of it. These will come as a boon to Littell's fans.