Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

 

Known classic spy/thriller novel from the mid-1970s. Turns out it's really well-written. It seems to me to have a lot in common with Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, though there's a reasonable case the stakes are higher, here--losing WW2 instead of just having De Gaulle assassinated--but the dogged pursuit of the one very threatening expert is a real parallel, here. The characters are mostly believable, the pacing is deft (there's some skimming through time to get to spring of 1944, but I think the bits from earlier are necessary for the stories in the novel). The authorial voice is very British, which makes sense since the author is British; the dialogue seems at least not implausible (I don't know Brit slang of the era enough to say for certain). Interestingly, I think there might be some things that showed up either in Nonesuch or Atonement when things were happening in the same timeframe as this, makes me wonder whether those things are in the British collective memory as real things, or if they've just shown up in enough fiction set in the time that people use them; if the latter, I suspect Follett was probably earlier.