The secrets business

by Stephen Barlay

Here you will find an explanation to the lucrative racket of espionage in big business and how it operates. One private detective after another freely relates their experiences, many of which were found to be sheer invention. Regarded as the tip of the iceberg, the mass of business intelligence lurks down in the depths of darkness.

Business consultants and marketing specialists welcomed the opportunity to talk about their work and achievements to someone, anyone, as long as they felt admired. They work for themselves and profit is their sole motive. They wield real power but they can never brag about their deals and influence to their families.

Contacts, informers, industrial security agents, counterespionage specialists, detectives economic intelligence officers and lawyers influenced the end product of this book. This is the real-life world of James Bond.

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Born Istvàn Bokor to a Jewish family in Budapest. Barlay's childhood was marked by a massacre in the block in which he lived, the loss of his father to forced labour and many other family members to the Auschwitz deportations. After the Second World War, Barlay became a radio journalist.

On 23 October 1956, Barlay was in the headquarters of Hungarian radio as the first shots of the revolution were fired outside. With the Soviet invasion under way, and arrest imminent, he escaped from Hungary, accompanied by Àgi, the woman he had married weeks before and with whom he would spend the rest of his life.

From the moment he arrived, he saw Britain as his home, although his first novel was based on the events of 1956. Four Black Cars, written with another refugee, the film director Peter Sasdy, began a career that resulted in 14 books. Barlay wrote most of his books in English - his adopted language. He wrote investigative works such as Sex Slavery (1968), Aircrash Detective (1969), Fire (1972) and Double Cross (1973), about industrial espionage. A BBC TV adaptation of the latter, The Double Dealers, was broadcast in 1974. His fiction includes the 1976 thriller Blockbuster, the plot of which involved a wartime munitions ship that still lies wrecked in the Thames estuary.

Barlay suffered a stroke in 2008 and passed away three years later. He was survived by his wife Àgi and sons Nick and Robin Barlay.