![]() First edition (UK) | |
Author | Sarah Gainham |
---|---|
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Genre | Thriller |
Publisher | Arthur Barker |
Publication date | 1957 |
Media type |
The Cold Dark Night is a 1957 spy thriller novel by the British writer Sarah Gainham. [1] Her second novel, it is set at the height of the Cold War when the 1954 Berlin Conference saw the Big Four foreign ministers arrive in the divided city. [2] Gainham had worked in Berlin as a journalist at the time of the Conference.
Joe Purdey, an American journalist in Berlin to cover the conference encounters Gisela Schill, an refugee from East Germany whose husband has gone missing while working for British intelligence behind the Iron Curtain. He is drawn into the world of subterfuge and low-level spying taking place in the city. The novel concludes with a face-off between British and Soviet forces at the Anhalter Bahnhof, a ruined railway terminus on the border between the two zones.
Spy fiction is a genre of literature involving espionage as an important context or plot device. It emerged in the early twentieth century, inspired by rivalries and intrigues between the major powers, and the establishment of modern intelligence agencies. It was given new impetus by the development of fascism and communism in the lead-up to World War II, continued to develop during the Cold War, and received a fresh impetus from the emergence of rogue states, international criminal organizations, global terrorist networks, maritime piracy and technological sabotage and espionage as potent threats to Western societies. As a genre, spy fiction is thematically related to the novel of adventure, the thriller and the politico-military thriller.
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Night Falls on the City is a 1967 novel by the British writer Sarah Gainham. A commercial and critical success, it was the first of her Vienna trilogy followed by A Place in the Country (1969) and Private Worlds (1971). Marking a change from the series of spy thrillers she produced in the 1950s, it remains her best-known work
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