At Five Books, the Stockholm-based spy novelist Jeremey Duns offers a fascinating survey of some compelling thrillers from the Cold War era, including Yulian Semyonov’s Seventeen Moments of Spring, a Russian genre classic featuring the exploits of Maksim Esaev, a Soviet rival to James Bond; and Noel Behn's “unbelievably bleak” The Kremlin Letter, which was adapted into a 1970 film directed by John Huston, with a cast that included Orson Welles and Max von Sydow.
