Alexander Eberlin is a small, faceless civil servant working for the Government at the height of the Cold War. As he nears middle age, he allows himself one luxury - to dress like a Dandy. His superiors send him on a mission to hunt down and destroy a cold-blooded and vicious Russian assassin named Krasnevin, who is responsible for a number of British agents' deaths. But Eberlin has a secret - he is Krasnevin. This is the story of what happens when Eberlin is sent to destroy himself. This classic, gripping spy novel is back in print fifty years after it was written, and is entrancing a whole new generation of readers.
Author
Derek William Mario Marlowe was an English playwright, novelist, screenwriter and painter. His father was Frederick William Marlowe (an electrician) and his mother Helene Alexandroupolos. He had early education at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Holland Park. In 1959 Marlowe went to Queen Mary College of the University of London to study English literature. Marlowe calls his time spent there the unhappiest years of his life.He never finished his degree course – Alex Hamilton claims he was expelled for "satire and kindred villainies". Marlowe wrote and edited an article for the college magazine, a parody of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye which reflected what Marlowe called "the boredom of college seminars." However, the college had a particularly fine theatre (the former People's Palace in Mile End Road) and Marlowe became part of a core theatre group there. In 1960 the college group formed a semi-professional theatre company, the 60 Theatre Group, and took their production of Tennessee Williams' play Summer and Smoke to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with Marlowe in the leading role opposite Audrey "Dickie" Gaskell. At college, Marlowe was a contemporary of the poet Lee Harwood, and after leaving he shared a flat with fellow writers Tom Stoppard and Piers Paul Read. He married Susan Rose "Suki" Phipps, in 1968; together they had a son, Ben, to add to Suki's two sons and two daughters from a previous marriage. He divorced in 1985 and in 1989 he moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote a number of scripts for television, including the award-winning Two Mrs. Grenvilles, Abduction of Innocence and an episode of Murder, She Wrote. While working there, he contracted leukaemia, and died of a brain haemorrhage after a liver transplant. He was cremated in California, but his ashes were brought back to England by his sister, Alda. At the time of his death he was planning to return to England and complete a tenth novel, Black and White. Summarised from Wikipedia
