The Cooler (Bantam Books #T7995)

Originally published in 1974, this was the first novel by American ex-military correspondent and crime reporter Markstein, who is best remembered as the co-creator of the influential cult TV show "The Prisoner". Some of the themes and elements of that show resurface here in a more conventional World War II espionage thriller. This comes as no surprise, since Markstein at least partially based the show on his knowledge of still-shadowy secret facilities set up during WWII by British intelligence. These functioned as prisons for people who "knew too much" and, if allowed to move about freely, might constitute a national security threat. One such place was Inverlair Lodge, in Scotland, and a thinly fictional version ("Inverloch") is the "The Cooler" of the title. Set in the Spring of 1944, the book open with Cpt. Loach, a British agent who's been on repeated missions to occupied France. His mission is scrubbed and he's forced to cool his heels for a few days, but the stress drives him to a horrific act. Another agent is Clare, a posh woman who displays an aptitude for espionage work -- until her competitiveness and suppressed "issues" get the most of her. These two are sent off to Inverloch for "special training", the truth of which only gradually dawns upon them. Meanwhile, a third character is Grau, a German agent posing as secondhand bookseller in London, carefully poking around for useful tidbits to send to his controllers. As D-Day approaches, British intelligence starts to suspect that one of the highly-trained damaged agents incarcerated at Inverloch may actually be a double-agent, and may have the capacity to reveal the D-Day landing zones. All of this unveils in classic cloak-and-dagger fashion, with warring factions with the intelligence world, and utterly ruthless high-level controllers of the utmost circumspection and sangfroid. This who enjoy WWII espionage stories will definitely find this too their taste, although it's a rather simple story by the standards of today's convoluted sagas. It's also slightly flawed in that early on there is a blazing bright clue to the double-agent. I'm not one to generally pick up on such things, but even I had a good idea what was what based on that. But it is a good, quick reading piece of entertainment, and one that sold something like 200,000 copies in its days.

By May of 1944 there were only two things left for the British Intelligence to keep secret. One was the invasion of Normandy. The other was the CoolerCaptain James Loach, spy and sexual deviate, was rather intimately involved with both. It would never have happened if they hadn't scrapped his third mission to France. The British rested their spies in posh London flats, with all male comforts attended to. Especially the most important. Which is where the trouble started for Loach...that nasty business with a naked girl and a bloodied riding crop."A bit of a mess," they called it, but it was more than that. What do you do with a man too highly trained and knowledgeable to be simply discharged?You invent the Cooler.Loach wasn't the only one in trouble. There were others, each knowing too much, and all of them unstable. It was a dangerous group, especially when one turned out to be a German spy with enough secrets to sink a thousand ships on their way to Normandy.