James Purdon
The Adventures of Snooky
To connoisseurs of the early British spy fiction published during the decade or so before the First World War, purity constitutes part of the nostalgic appeal. Look back to the dashed-off novels of Headon Hill or E Phillips Oppenheim – or even to Erskine Childers’s more thoughtful The Riddle of the Sands – and you gaze on a simpler version of the Great Game, unclouded by the murky ambiguity that would later descend upon the hunched shoulders of the Ambler or Le Carré spook.
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