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The Discreet Interventions of Verdon James
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 7, 2025
It was an interesting novel, more a collection of short stories, tied together in autobiographical form. An upper class Jeeves who sorts problems
August 2, 2015
0) Caveat: I have no skill for writing reviews.
1) The summary that goodreads doesn't bother to give (copied by hand from the dust jacket)
When the great and good find themselves in desperate situations, they turn to Oxford man, Verdon James. His oblique intelligence and penetrating insights have come to their rescue more times than he has ever cared to remember - until now.
Here he recalls some of his most memorable interventions: the resurrection of the dead to save an ancestral estate, his elegant riposte to blackmail, a campaign of deception in World War II (which continued to deceive indie the walls of Spandau long after VE Day), his first youthful introduction to the world of espionage and, many years later, his journey to Smolensk where he stumbles upon the truth about the Dark Blue spies who kept their secrets - if not their country's - rather longer than their Cambridge counterparts"
2) On adding it to my goodreads bookshelf, I was sad to see this book ahd fallen through the cracks of time. James and his interventions fall into the notches between fiction, fact, the fiction that might be facts, and the facts that might be fiction. There's so much real-world built into the imaginary that you can one, learn a lot and two, get lost in that learning. Even the completely fictional stories are rooted enough in fact that they come off as real. The writing is a bit distant and old-fashioned, sometimes breaking the fourth wall; take it or leave it.
I don't keep a lot of books after I read them, but this one I will.
1) The summary that goodreads doesn't bother to give (copied by hand from the dust jacket)
When the great and good find themselves in desperate situations, they turn to Oxford man, Verdon James. His oblique intelligence and penetrating insights have come to their rescue more times than he has ever cared to remember - until now.
Here he recalls some of his most memorable interventions: the resurrection of the dead to save an ancestral estate, his elegant riposte to blackmail, a campaign of deception in World War II (which continued to deceive indie the walls of Spandau long after VE Day), his first youthful introduction to the world of espionage and, many years later, his journey to Smolensk where he stumbles upon the truth about the Dark Blue spies who kept their secrets - if not their country's - rather longer than their Cambridge counterparts"
2) On adding it to my goodreads bookshelf, I was sad to see this book ahd fallen through the cracks of time. James and his interventions fall into the notches between fiction, fact, the fiction that might be facts, and the facts that might be fiction. There's so much real-world built into the imaginary that you can one, learn a lot and two, get lost in that learning. Even the completely fictional stories are rooted enough in fact that they come off as real. The writing is a bit distant and old-fashioned, sometimes breaking the fourth wall; take it or leave it.
I don't keep a lot of books after I read them, but this one I will.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews