The Foot Soldiers: A Sunday Times Thriller of the Month (Jonas Merrick series)

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Television adaptations have been made Gerald Seymour (born 25 November 1941 in Guildford, Surrey) is a British writer. If he finds out who the mole is, perhaps Igor can be used as a tethered goat to lure the Russian assassins to make another attempt at a time and place of his choosing in Denmark. The three British masters of suspense, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and John le Carre, have been joined by a fourth - Gerald Seymour * New York Times on The Outsiders * I thoroughly enjoyed The Foot Soldiers. It’s probably my favourite since A Deniable Death. It is especially good on the rivalry between MI5 and MI6 employees. A cleverly nuanced climax in which tables are unexpectedly turned more than once . . . marks this as a novel of real quality. Top brass - The Times

A cleverly nuanced climax in which tables are unexpectedly turned more than once . . . marks this as a novel of real quality. Top brass * The Times *

Gerald Seymour has found a good formula for churning out novels almost, it seems, at will. This reader has read many of them over the years and has usually found them current, realistic and well researched. Each are different from one another and on this occasion, this reader thought that even though it was a bit slow in places, the novel itself felt authentic, quite believable with realistic characters and situations. This person thought that he was actually on the bus (in chapter 16) looking over at the park where Jonas and the surveillance team were stationed with Sadie Jilkes badgering the bus driver to stop. Quite an accomplishment by the author. Stars: ‘The Waiting Time’, ‘Holding the Zero’, ‘The Dealer and the Dead’,‘No Mortal Thing’, ‘The Outsiders’, ‘A Deniable Death’, ‘A Damn Serious Business’, ‘Archangel’, ‘No Mortal Thing’, ‘The Crocodile Hunter', 'Foot Soldiers', 'The Collaborator’,‘Killing Ground’, 'The Journeyman Tailor’, ’Tinker, Taylor, Soldier Spy’, ‘Field of Blood’, ‘Harry’s Game’. (17). Initially a journalist, Gerald joined the Independent Television Network (ITN) in 1963, and forged a successful career. He covered controversial situations such as the Munich Olympics Massacre and Palestinian Militant Groups. A boon of Gerald’s novels is that he manages to thrill readers without being unrealistic. Though his fast-paced novels are full of suspense, they are down-to-earth. Gerald uses his experiences to make the ongoing military conflict in the places where he has worked real for his readers. Long time readers of Seymour's fabulous secret service novels will remember early books that had sad and depressing endings. When the final chapters became more upbeat I thought somebody must have told Mr. Seymour that he could make the story as dreadfully depressing as he liked but the denouement was to be cheerful or his books would not be published.

This is multi-layered spy-fi at its best, with Seymour showing that even after thirty-seven novels he has lost none of his talent for thrilling plots and creating credible and sympathetic characters, nor his journalist's eye for modern espionage tradecraft and techniques - Shots Magazine A British writer, Gerald Seymour is most famous for describing reality-based, war-time conflict. He is the best-selling author of over 30 thrillers. It happens to every reader that now and then one comes across a book best described as “un-put-down-able”. You’ve been there, I’m sure. My average for devouring one of those books is two days at most; “The Crocodile Hunter” took me two weeks. Most “Must-put-down-able”. Just like the crocodile I had to come up for air now and then. It’s the first book I’ve read by Gerald Seymour. I chose the book because I’ve heard so much about his previous writing. Unfortunately, the book left me underwhelmed. After the successful release of his second novel, The Glory Boys, Gerald moved to Dublin, Ireland, with his family. Sensing the need to slow down and let younger reporters have opportunities, he retired from television reporting in 1978 and became a full-time novelist.In Denmark a Russian GRU agent Igor approaches an MI6 officer stationed in the country and says he wants to defect. This is a headache for MI6 as they are not benefiting from any intelligence he would have gathered for them as a double agent. Instead there is suspicion as to if he is a genuine defector or not. The story is about counter-intelligence and MI5, which is inherently duller than espionage and MI6 (catching spies is mmore boring than spying), but that was not the problem - the plot was good enough. What I had a hard time to bear with was the protagonist’s characterisation; with the aim of making him look smart and unconventional, the author stretches the protagonist’s habits, customs and idiosyncrasies to such an extreme that he becomes a caricature (almost an OCD type); except that making your dude look like a weirdo does not make him more interesting - to me, at least. By continuing to disguise himself as an idiot, he ends up looking like one. The Glory Boys, published in 1976, was Gerald’s second thriller. It focuses on the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. The novel, which won a nomination for the Edgar Award, begins with three terrorists from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) on their way to London to kill Israeli nuclear scientist David Sokarev, who is there to give a lecture. Only one member of the group, Abdel-El-Famy, survives a brush with a three-man hit squad sent by Israeli Intelligence to ambush them. If le Carre had written about spies on the front line . . . Seymour makes more than le Carre of treachery's potential impact on frontline personnel. [A] masterly novel - The Sunday Times

Gerald Seymour is one of my 'go to' thriller writers. You know the writing will be good and often there is a link to his previous career as a journalist. But then again, all the characters of the book are mediocre people, bored, tired people just wanting out of whatever they are in; maybe that's the world the author wanted to paint. If so, so be it, but the effect for the reader is certainly not uplifting.

Review

Is the information they bring worth the cost of protecting them for the rest of their lives? Is it even genuine? Might they be double agents? This is a wonderfully complex and unputdownable tale of defectors, traitors, internal politics or "high jingo" as Michael Connelly would describe it and assassination both actual and character. But while Jonas’s colleagues regard him as scratchy, fastidious, old, he is also ruthless, cunning and brutally pragmatic. And he has a man on the inside: a would-be money-launderer on that wild Spanish coast. A man who has been undercover for so long, he has almost forgotten who he really is. Seymour produces the most intelligent writing in the thriller genre * Financial Times on Beyond Recall * A brilliant, suspenseful and contemporary thriller . . . A wonderfully complex and unputdownable tale of defectors, traitors, internal politics . . . and assassination'