Arena

"I prefer the tobacco business." The Turkish police and secret police; Soviet diplomats (spies); the US consulate and its intelligence arm; Mossad; and even the legacy of the Gestapo, for this is immediate post-war Istanbul – all are lined up against Leon Bauer, though they don’t know he is their object of attention for much of “Istanbul Passage”. And then there is the city with its shifting alliances and uncertainty about which way modern Turkey should move: “This place! No one knows who anyone is!” Leon, who is an American working for a tobacco company but, on the side, for US intelligence, enacts a neat reversal of the film, “Casablanca”, inasmuch as he is hiding not a hero of the resistance to Nazism but someone who is probably a murderer of Jews but whose knowledge is of potential value to the US as it and the USSR begin their Cold War antagonism. All of this makes for a tense novel but one in which the way the story is told adds to the intrigue. The last espionage thriller w