The Secret Lives Of
A Secret Agent: The Mysterious Life and Times of Alexander Wilson
by Tim Crook [Illustrated Paperback] 685 pages, ISBN-13 978-0954289980,
Language: English. Intelligence & family history, literary biography.
£29.99.
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About the book
Spring 1941. A seven-year-old
boy says goodbye to his father, Alexander Wilson, a lieutenant colonel
in the Indian Army, at a Yorkshire railway station for the last time
and grieves more than a year later when told of his death at the Battle
of El Alamein. 64 years later actor and poet Mike Shannon asks his
friend Tim Crook to help unlock the secrets of his father's life.
In a five-year odyssey Tim embarks on a remarkable investigation of
family history, espionage and spy writing. Mike hands over a single
copy of the spy novel 'Wallace Intervenes' that his father wrote in
1939.
Tim discovers that Alexander
Wilson wrote and published 20 more novels and three academic books,
had been a popular and highly acclaimed espionage and thriller author
of the 1920s and 30s and bridged the style and significance of John
Buchan, Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene
and John Le Carre. But he disappears without trace after 1940.
Wilson encodes real life
spying and 'The Great Game' of intelligence into his novels. He creates
a chief of a fictional British Secret Service, Sir Leonard Wallace,
who is substantially based on the first real 'C' of MI6, Captain Mansfield
Smith-Cumming. Alexander Douglas Gordon Chesney Wilson is an army
officer and father without any trace of birth, marriage or death,
or tangible link to any reference in army records. He is a man without
a beginning or end.
This is the story of how
Tim Crook unravelled the intelligence legend that masked a double
life more dramatic, complex, romantic and tragic than any character
or plot conjured by the world of spy fiction. This is an investigation
that has changed lives and revealed the career of an intelligence
officer, agent, and espionage writer 'lost to history'.
The journey spans the globe
and involves the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, the Security Service,
MI5, Indian Political Intelligence and its Bureau in New Delhi during
the British Empire, and two World Wars. In the mysterious life and
times of Alexander Wilson we encounter Winston Churchill, Lawrence
of Arabia, Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, and Mahatma
Gandhi. It is a story of love, betrayal, broken hearts, terrorism,
patriotism, and a triumph of human dignity.
In 'Wallace Intervenes'
Alexander Wilson wrote 'nothing can be underhand that is performed
in the service of country'. The implications of that maxim for his
surviving family are unimaginable.
Quotation from the book:
'Wilson was tripping the same haunts of all these famous literary
catholic converts: Muggeridge, Waugh and Greene. They may well have
passed small talk, tipped their hats to each other, or brushed shoulders,
one leaving a taxi, the other getting in at SIS Broadway, the Foreign
Office, the Ministry of Information and the Authors' Club in Whitehall.
Little did they know that the charming and affable creator of Sir
Leonard Wallace secret service stories in the Indian Army uniform
was a true-life human character of Shakespearean proportions whose
internal and external being would be way beyond any of their imaginations
and in all probability psychological and spiritual understanding'.
Senior Lecturer at Goldmiths,
University of London, Tim Crook, giving a presentation on the subject
of 'Mythologizing the first 'C' of MI6 through the novels of Alexander
Wilson' at a conference on 'Covert Cultures' hosted by CRASSH at the
University of Cambridge on 4th and 5th February 2011
The author Tim Crook reads
the first part of the first chapter of his biography of the spy and
author Alexander Wilson "The Secret Lives Of A Secret Agent: The Life
and Times of Alexander Wilson," published by Kultura Press in October
2010. 13 minutes 14 seconds.
About the Author
Tim Crook is an award-winning
journalist, author and academic based at Goldsmiths, University of
London. He has written several books on journalism, radio and media
law and researches spy writing and the rituals and practices of espionage.
Tim Crook reveals how the
family of an MI6 secret agent helped him establish:
A Secret Agent in his
cover identity launched a successful career as a spy novelist mythologizing
the first Chief 'C' of MI6;
The proto James Bond spy
novels propagandised and promoted the global prowess of the British
Secret Service making it more powerful and deadly than was the case;
Enemy spy agencies were
taken in and deceived;
His books encoded intelligence,
tradecraft from the real world of spying;
They were used to send
out warnings that could not be expressed in mainstream media;
Alexander Wilson turned
out to be a talented and highly acclaimed writer, celebrated throughout
the 1930s, but then the cover identity and
career was killed off
during World War Two;
The book is the result
of 5 years of research into the world of Spooks;
The rest may be…
Top Secret and classified
on the grounds of National Security
Two of Alexander Wilson's
sons, Dennis Wilson and Mike Shannon, had been unaware of each other's
existence for 74 years and met each other for the first time in 2007
and discovered that they were both poets. Kultura Press has published
their work:
