Stella Rimington's 6 favorite secret-agent novels

The renowned spy-novel author — and former director-general of MI5, Britain’s internal counterintelligence agency — recommends some of her favorite espionage-themed diversions

Novelist Stella Rimington.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré (Scribner, $16). Le Carré’s 1974 novel about the search for a mole in British intelligence has a cast of wonderful characters, many of whom are reminiscent of people I met back in the 1970s: mild-mannered George Smiley; Connie Sachs—retired and gin-sodden, but still with an impeccable memory. The jargon of “ferrets,” “lamplighters,” and “the Circus” makes us all insiders.

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (Penguin, $10). Two young men on a sailing holiday in the North Sea’s Frisian Islands discover that Germany is secretly preparing an invasion of Britain. Childers’ 1903 novel is a book full of atmosphere—cold swirling fog, sinister Germans, and a protagonist, “Carruthers,” who is a minor official in the British Foreign Office.

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The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth (Bantam, $8). What’s so good here is the chilling contrast between a quiet town in Suffolk, England, and the devastation being prepared by a crack Soviet agent living there. On the faintest of clues, the investigator unravels the plot, as always, just in time.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Dover, $3.50). I had just finished reading this when I was recruited by MI5. Kim, a street urchin in Lahore, becomes involved in the Great Game, the struggle for Central Asia between Russia and Britain. He is recruited by a horse dealer who is also a British agent. “It was intrigue of some kind, Kim knew.”

Stella Rimington is a former director-general of MI5, Britain’s internal counterintelligence agency. "Dead Line," her fourth spy novel, has just been published in the U.S. by Knopf