The Ninth Directive

Adam Hall

MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, Aug 30, 2011 - Fiction - 172 pages

When a security exercise goes wrong, a rogue agent must defend a British diplomat from Thai assassins

Quiller is not an easy man to work with. Freethinking to the point of insubordination, he’s the kind of spy who gives his superiors ulcers. But his case file, going back to his work against the Nazis, speaks for itself. The Bureau ranks him as a #9 agent—Reliable Under Torture—and that’s the kind of man they need in Bangkok. Because an important British official is coming to visit, and the Bureau wants Quiller to plan the diplomat’s murder. Of course, it’s only a security exercise. The official will be traveling under top-notch protection, and they want Quiller to devise an assassination plot to test the abilities of his security detail. But for the diplomat and for Quiller, the danger quickly becomes real.

About the author

Adam Hall was a pseudonym of Elleston Trevor (1920–1995), a prolific English author whose more than eighty books spanned a range of genres, from suspense to children’s literature. He joined the Royal Air Force upon finishing preparatory school, but was barred from flying because his eyes were hypersensitive to sunlight. Instead he worked as an engineer, and began writing fiction in his spare time, completing one short novel every two weeks. He published his first mystery novel, Now Try the Morgue, in 1944, and had his first hit a decade later with The Big Pick-Up, which was adapted for the screen under the title Dunkirk. In 1965, Trevor wrote his first espionage thriller. Written under the pseudonym Adam Hall—which he chose at random from a phone book—The Quiller Memorandum won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1966. Quiller became one of the most iconic spies of Cold War fiction, and over the next three decades Trevor wrote a total of nineteen novels in the series. Trevor died in Arizona in 1995.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Ninth Directive
• Author: Adam Hall
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, 2011
• ISBN: 1453228004, 9781453228005
• Length: 172 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Thrillers / Espionage; Fiction / Thrillers / Political; Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense