Venetian Blind (novel)
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Venetian Blind is a 1959 suspense novel by the British author William Haggard published in England by Cassell and in the United States by Ives Washburn. It was Haggard's second of 21 books involving his protagonist Colonel Charles Russell, the head of the unobtrusive but lethal Security Executive, a government counter-intelligence agency. Like many of Haggard's books it has both standard elements of suspense and an almost Henry Jamiesian exposition of British Establishment mores and character, in both the government and upper-class financiers, scientists, industrialists, and their families.
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]
Like Haggard's first book, Slow Burner, which involved the exploitation of a fictional nuclear power source, Venetian Blind's events turn on the existence of another notion from Science fiction, "negative gravity".
References
- ↑ From the back flap of the dust jacket of the Walker and Company American edition of The Conspirators, New York, 1967