The Secret Agent

A shopkeeper in Soho sells stationery, pornography and information, and takes his orders from an embassy that wants an outrage shocking enough to frighten England into repression. Conrad based the plot on a real attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and wrote it in his third language, with a coldness he never matched elsewhere. Nothing in it is simple except the title. Fifty-nine plates of docks, night streets and low life by Grimshaw and Doré run alongside the tale, matching its foggy London of shops, shadows and quiet menace.