Category Archives: SPYCRAFT & WARFARE

Back to Slough House

Posted on December 5, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Having recently read what may very well be my favorite Mick Herron novel so far, The Secret Hours, I was going to write one of Gotham Calling’s occasional pieces about spy yarns without pictures inside… Between this and catching up … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

A couple of offbeat spy novels

Posted on October 10, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

When I’m not compulsively watching spy shows on TV, spy fiction tends to occupy a sizeable portion of my reading time, so I thought I’d share a few impressions on a couple of novels that approach the genre in very … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

More thoughts on 21st-century spy shows: Cold War edition

Posted on May 23, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

When I wrote about the TV series Slow Horses, last month, I mentioned how one of the departures from the source novels was that the show didn’t take advantage of the potential of sleeper agents to act as metaphors for … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Some thoughts on 21st-century spy shows

Posted on April 17, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Secret agents and international intrigue have really come back with a vengeance in the past decade or so. The War on Terror and, later, the renewed tension between the West and Russia seem to have stimulated the public’s appetite for … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Spotlight on the Unknown Soldier, 1997

Posted on March 20, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

After being absent from the stands for about eight years, in 1997 the spy/war comic Unknown Soldier got the Vertigo treatment. By then, the Vertigo imprint had come to specialize in getting edgy (usually British) creators to reimagine third-tier DC … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Another couple of British spy novels

Posted on March 8, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Along with Eurocomics and old TV shows, I also like to use Gotham Calling to highlight cool spy novels. Here are a couple of British contributions to the genre that should please any self-respecting afficionados: BERLIN GAME (Len Deighton, 1983) … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Catching up with war comics

Posted on January 18, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Every once in a while, Dead Reckoning – an imprint of the U.S. Naval Institute’s book-publishing division – sends me graphic novels to review in Gotham Calling. Last year they sent me The Lions of Leningrad and The Stretcher Bearers, … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

More cool episodes of Mission: Impossible

Posted on January 11, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

This is Gotham Calling’s 600th post! As usual, I like to signal these benchmarks with longer listicles (a hundred posts ago I listed my favorite westerns), so today I’m doing a follow-up to the post from last September ranking the … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A couple of 21st-century spy novels

Posted on October 26, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Another post based on my summer reads… Besides science fiction, as always I also spent part of my break reading spy yarns. The last time I wrote about this type of books in the blog I focused on a couple … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gotham Calling’s top Mission: Impossible episodes

Posted on September 15, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Today is Gotham Calling’s eighth anniversary! Since I celebrated the blog’s previous anniversary with a list of my top 50 film noirs, this time around I was going to do a list of my top spy films, but I ended … Continue reading →

Posted in SPYCRAFT & WARFARE | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment