Five Best These spy tales are unsurpassed, says novelist Alan Furst 1 Our Man in Havana By Graham Greene Viking, 1958 Graham Greene’s work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and “Our Man in Havana” may be his best. The problem here is Hollywood: Just as you can’t read Greene’s “The Third Man” without thinking of Orson Welles, “Our Man in Havana” instantly brings to mind Alec Guinness, followed closely by the sublime Ernie Kovacs. But the book itself is a marvel, making fun of the espionage business while still remaining a spy novel. It brings ample suspense and expertly wrought ambience to its tale of a British vacuum-cleaner salesman in Cuba who reluctantly agrees to become an MI6 agent. He begins filing fanciful reports—including sketches of a secret military installation based on a vacuum-cleaner design—that the home office takes all too seriously. “Our Man in Havana” is a honey of a beach read, best served with rum and Coke. 2 The Miernik Dossier By Charles McCarry Saturday Review Press, 1973 With “The Miernik Dossier,” Charles McCarry introduced us to Paul Christopher, the brilliant and sensitive CIA officer who would appear in a series of perhaps more widely known novels, such as “The Secret Lovers” and “Second Sight.” The book itself is the “dossier” in question: the reports and memoranda filed by a quintet of mutually mistrustful espionage agents, including a seductive Hungarian princess and a seemingly hapless Polish scientist, who undertake to drive from Switzerland to the Sudan in a Cadillac. It is a travelogue that bristles with suspicion and deception—but don’t listen to me, listen to a certain highly acclaimed spy novelist who reviewed McCarry’s literary debut: “The level of reality it achieves is high indeed; it is superbly constructed, wholly convincing, and displays insights that are distinctly refreshing. A new and very welcome talent.” Good call, Eric Ambler. 3 The Levanter By Eric Ambler Atheneum, 1972 Dedicated readers of the spy-fiction genre will surely have read Eric Ambler’s “A Coffin for Dimitrios,” but “The Levanter”—written more than 30 years later—also qualifies as a classic. Set in Syria in 1970, the novel tells the story of Michael Howell, a Middle Eastern businessman of complex ethnic descent. Howell, who is trying to get his money out of the region during the shaky aftermath of the Six Day War, discovers that a factory he owns in Damascus has been turned into a bomb-making facility by the Palestine Action Force, which vows to destroy Israel. “The Levanter” features some of the strongest action scenes to be found in Ambler—who can, in some of his fiction, stay in one place for a whole novel. But not here, not here. 4 The Honourable Schoolboy By John le Carré Knopf, 1977 This is, on certain days, my favorite le Carré—a novel that is the embodiment of its epigraph from W.H. Auden, namely: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” That would serve well for le Carré’s entire oeuvre. The prose in “The Honourable Schoolboy” shows this highly literate novelist at his best—which, I suspect, has to do with the heartfelt nature of the book, set in Hong Kong and London in 1974, with the grinding end of the Vietnam War as its backdrop. Another plus: The whole le Carré gang is here; the ever-endearing George Smiley, “young Peter Guillam,” and the relentless researcher and scourge of Russian Cold War spooks, Connie Sachs. Joined by the journalist and part-time spy Jerry Westerby—as ironic and cynical as you’d wish—they leap into action after detecting hints that the elusive Soviet agent Karla is moving money through Hong Kong. Fast-paced from start to finish, “The Honourable Schoolboy” is fired by le Carré’s conviction regarding evil done and its consequences. 5 Moura By Nina Berberova New York Review Books, 2005 “Moura” is not a spy novel, I confess, but it was written by the Russian novelist and short-story writer Nina Berberova, and the book—subtitled “The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg”—affords all the pleasures of first-rate fiction. The mysterious baroness, known as Moura, was likely a Soviet spy and possibly a double agent, as Berberova shows in this intricate biography, one that is also a meditation on Bolsheviks, penniless Baltic nobility and the attractions of the femme fatale. (Moura’s lovers included Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and the British spy Robert Lockhart.) Berberova (1901-93), who knew Moura when they both lived in Gorky’s chaotic household in the 1920s, was an émigré in occupied Paris during World War II, then moved to the U.S., where she taught at Princeton. Though “Moura” was published in Russian in 1981, it didn’t appear in English until four years ago, with Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester’s translation. As many readers discovered then, Berberova is a splendid writer who deserves to be better known. Mr. Furst’s novels include “The Polish Officer” (1995) and “Dark Voyage” (2004). “The Spies of Warsaw” (2008) has just been published in paperback.