A few obituaries were written on the death of the spy novel once the Cold War ended, but these were quickly retracted, as realisation dawned that neither history nor spies had ceased to exist. People like author Olen Steinhauer — born in Virginia, now settled in Budapest — explained what fans of Graham Greene, John le Carre and Alan Furst had always known. He said it very simply in an interview in January: “Spy fiction can encompass all the social commentary, realism, philosophy and fine writing of literature, yet still maintain the vigorous pacing that hooks an audience.”

And he has done just that in his first five novels which he wrote after a Fulbright fellowship took him to Romania, The Bridge of Sighs, The Confession, The Vienna Assignment, The Istanbul Variations and Victory Square — the story of life in an (unnamed) East European country from 1948 all the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

The characters are self-absorbed, with commitments and responsibilities of varying degrees about the creation of a socialist state — there are Brano Sev, the lonely, stoic and ruthless agent and officer of the People’s Militia; the younger and smarter Gavra Noukas who isn’t quite sure why he is an agent and is continuing as one; and Emil Brod, the oldest, who ends up as Chief of Police and simply wants to solve cases and get on with his job.

What rivet you to the set of five are, of course, the shifting locales, the dark side woven so completely with lofty ideas and the painstaking research that forms the backdrop of the series. Now, with the East European countries trying to cope with their past, its residue and the trauma of trying to integrate, on uncertain terms, with the rest of the world, these books offer a fascinating window to what life was in those times. The sparsely stocked shelves of supermarkets or General Secretary Tomiak Pankov’s birthday celebrations are contrasted with repeated temptations for the characters to cross over, run away and escape to the West — a promise of life with the favourite lover, “football matches on TV on the weekend” and another kind of empty pointlessness (as brooding agent Sev characterises it in The Vienna Assignment).

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