The Valley of the Fox

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First published in 1982, The Valley of the Fox is the fourth and final book in a series by Joseph Hone, who I regard as one of the great spy novelists of the twentieth century. In the last few decades, Hone’s standing in the genre has been somewhat eclipsed by the likes of John le Carré and Len Deighton, but in his day he was widely seen as their equal. In 1972 Newsweek called The Private Sector the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, while in 1984 the New York Times’ Anatole Broyard called The Sixth Directorate ‘one of the best suspense novels of the last ten years’.

The idiosyncrasies of public taste are often unfathomable, but I sometimes wonder if more people don’t know of Hone’s work simply because it was neither fish nor fowl in the genre — rather, a less easily marketed combination. Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: ‘Field’ and ‘Desk’. James Bond is a field agent — we follow his adventures, not those of his superior M. In John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, the focus tends to be on those back at headquarters — George Smiley is a senior officer at the Circus (he later, briefly, becomes head of it).

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