The Secret Agent
Encyclopedia : T : TH : THE : The Secret Agent
The Secret Agent is a 1907 novel by Joseph Conrad, a bleak and darkly comic story of spies, terrorists, anarchists and agents provocateurs of an unnamed foreign power plotting and counter-plotting in the back streets of London in the early 20th century.
The novel centers on Verloc, a shop-owner, phony-anarchist and double-agent, who becomes embroiled in an ambitious terrorist plan to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. Other characters include Verloc's wife Winnie and Winnie's brother, Stevie; Ossipon and Michaelis, two anarchists; and Chief Inspector Heat, of the London police.
The book and Verloc's character are said to have influenced the Unabomber.
Conrad's The Secret Agent formed the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film, Sabotage. (Another 1936 Hitchcock film, Secret Agent, was based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham.) Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent, was also adapted sixty years later, in 1996, as a film starring Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette.
Trivia
According to Unabomber#Arrest_and_court_proceedings this book apparently had quite an effect on Theodore Kaczynski.External links
- [Free eBook: The Secret Agent] at Project Gutenberg
- [Public domain audio recording of The Secret Agent] from LibriVox
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.