The Arena (novel)
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The Arena is a 1961 suspense novel by the British author William Haggard published in England by Cassell and in the United States by ccccc. It was Haggard's third of 21 books involving his protagonist Colonel Charles Russell, the head of the unobtrusive but lethal Security Executive, a government counter-intelligence agency. Like most of the other works by Haggard and some by his near contemporaries Victor Canning and Michael Gilbert, it is both a standard novel of suspense and a semi-political thriller about the reactions of those in high government positions who scent potential danger to their own political standing from the on-going events of the novel.
Plot
Protagonist is perhaps too strong a word to describe Colonel Russell. As Haggard himself wrote about his fiction:
My novels are chiefly novels of suspense with a background of international politics. A Colonel Charles Russell of the Security Executive, a not entirely imaginary British counter-espionage organization, while not a protagonist in the technical sense, holds the story line together in the background by his operations, while the characters in the foreground carry the action."[1]
References
- ↑ From the back flap of the dust jacket of the Walker and Company American edition of The Conspirators, New York, 1967