The Scholars of Night

This is a Cold War spy thriller, published in 1988, when the Cold War was still on and fear of nuclear annihilation still felt very, very imminent. Ford was a great writer, and this book gives the lie to the defense for the sexism and other attitudes we are often urged not to criticize in older works "He was of his time." Ford's female characters have to deal with the sexism and misogyny of the time, but they themselves are strong, intelligent, independent, and not treated by Ford as if they deserve the attitudes they have to struggle against.Nicholas Hansard is a young professor of history at a small college, who also has a tiny toehold in the world of espionage--though he's not entirely aware of it. He just does some research and document authentication for The White Group, and has no real idea what The White Group really is.The really important thing he doesn't know, though, is that his mentor, Allan Berenson, is a spy, theoretically part of the US intelligence world, but in reality working for the Russians. When Berenson dies, apparently of a heart attack but in fact a carefully staged elimination of the double agent, things start spinning out of control, not just in Hansard's life, but, especially there.He nearly quits his enjoyable little side job with The White Group, having realized by events surrounding Berenson's death that something is very odd, but is persuaded to at least delay that resignation with the bait of a newly discovered play purportedly by Christopher Marlowe--who was himself a spy employed by Elizabeth I's spymaster, Francis Walsingham. He's given a copy, and sent to England to do the research necessary to determine if it's real.Once there, he meets a woman named Ellen Maxwell at the British Library, who is also there apparently doing research.Meanwhile, we are seeing other parts of the story from other viewpoints, including at a military wargaming center in Britain, a joint NATO operation testing new equipment and plans. We also see high-level Soviet (and more than thirty years later, I initially typed "Russian," because the world has changed) operatives in Britain, and the woman who was the number two in Berenson's ring, still working to carry out his plan, which includes a nuclear strike.All the different threads and players are intertwined in the story, and we can't always be sure who is really working for who. We don't, above all, know who Berenson's loyal and determined number two, going by code name WAGNER, really is, though there's more than one candidate, as well as the possibility that she's someone else.This is a subtle intricate, and satisfying Cold War spy thriller, with a greater awareness of the distance between social rules and reality than most (not all) of Ford's contemporaries in the field.Ford died in 2006, and due to lack of a will and a literary executor, and misunderstandings, his work has been out of print ever since. It's a joy to have this book available again after so many years, with the rest of Ford's work scheduled to be published over the next few years. Fair warning: This is his only book that isn't science fiction or fantasy, and this one is, arguably, alternate history, or secret history. The first to come back into print, last year, was The Dragon Waiting, is an alternate history historical fantasy.Highly recommended, and I mean that not just for this book, but for all of them, as they become available again.I bought this book

To say the Cold War was a golden age for spy fiction would be an understatement. Writers as wide-ranging as John le Carre, Len Deighton, and Tom Clancy launched careers and explored the decades-long conflict between East and West. When the front lines were invisible, the troops were the spies of both sides, and where science and technology, as well as historical grievances, all had a role to play. Few managed to bring together those strands as strongly as the late John M. Ford, who made his sole contribution to the genre with this 1988 thriller, now back in print after more than three decades.In some ways, The Scholars of Night feels like Ford's attempt to pastiche much of the Cold War spy genre. His lead character, Professor Nicholas Hansard, is an American based out of a US university and working for a think tank. Much of the action takes place in the UK, where both a spy ring after a defense system and a seemingly lost play by Christopher Marlowe are all in the field with secrets, lies, and betrayal surrounding them. As that description might suggest, there are shades of everything from the more reality-based end of the genre represented by le Carre to the technothrillers of Clancy and his many imitators. What Ford pastiches the most, however, are writers such as Anthony Price and Duncan Kyle, working in a strong historical element into the narrative in the form of the Marlowe play and the birth of British intelligence in the Elizabethan era.Yet, for all the apparent pastiche writing Ford does, his novel is very much its own beast. Ford effortlessly moves readers and narrative alike through time and space, from the then-present day of the late 1980s to the Elizabethan era. Indeed, sometimes doing so in the matter of paragraphs, moving from Hansard's attempt to authenticate the play manuscript and a burgeoning romance back in time to Marlowe and a host of familiar figures in the 1500s. That he does so while also exploring the backstories of the members of a spy ring and explaining the piece of technology they're after is all the more to Ford's credit as a writer. Yet, for all of its literary bent and sophistication, Ford never lets things get too complex or dense. The Scholars of Night isn't a large book, but a well-paced, if packed, narrative told inside less than 300 pages. It's a balancing act that Ford makes look effortless, making one wish he might have written more thrillers along these lines.The Scholars of Night is a gem of a thriller. Ford brings together a wide berth of influences, from the late Cold War espionage and technology to British theatre and its history all in one neat, slim, but surprisingly loaded package. Overlooked back then, like so much of Ford's work apparently, perhaps now it will find its moment in the spotlight.

This is a John M. Ford. Any John M. Ford is a presumptive buy for prose, plot dialogue and characters--and a straight plot summary would have far too many spoilers. (Do bear in mind that it really IS a Cold War thriller: it's not going to turn into science fiction or fantasy if you keep reading.) It gets one star knocked off for two reasons: (1) trying to unravel the plot at the end, I felt it to be a little too convoluted to be quite credible. In this sort of novel, that may be a feature and not a glitch. (2) Time passes. I'm old enough to remember the overall situation, the attitudes and the tech of the last years of the Cold War, which was when this was written. And the difference between a historical novel and a contemporary novel written at the same historical time is that the author of the contemporary novel doesn't go out of his way to explain things. A reader who's 30 years old, unless he's already read about these years, is going to have to run to catch up.But it's worth the sprint.

This is the most frustrating and consuming book I have ever read. It's full of characters you may or may not want to know, including a possible traitor. The book is like nothing I have read before. It is definitely great literature and they honestly do not write books like this anymore.

This book is perhaps interesting for a literary crowd. But as Cold War literature it is absolute balderdash, and does not even reach Tom Clancy levels of plausibility (not even the bad ones, let alone Red Storm Rising).

The book is long out of print, and author no longer with us, but this is the kind of work that make you wish John M Ford still wrote for a living.

Bought on the strength of Gaiman's blurb, and it didn't disappoint at all.

I’m still processing this book and am haunted by it. It’s a heady mix of literary fantasy and techno thriller before such thrillers were popular.Well worth a read now it’s been republished.

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