Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code Maker's War, 1941-45 (Espionage)

by Leo Marks (Author), Leo Marks (Author)

New
Paperback
2007
$19.47

In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 charing cross road, and went to war. He was twenty-two and a cryptographer of genius. In Between silk and cyanide , his critically acclaimed account of his time in SOE, Marks tells how he revolutionized the code-making techniques of the Allies, trained some of the most famous agents, who dropped into France including Violette Szabo and 'the White Rabbit', and why he wrote haunting verses including his The Life that I have poem. He reveals for the first time the disastrous dimensions of the code war between SOE and the Germans in Holland; how the Germans were fooled into thinking a Secret Army was operating in the Fatherland itself; and how and why he broke General de Gaulle's secret code. Both thrilling and Poignant, Marks' book is truly one of the last great Second World War memoirs.

Synopsis

In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 charing cross road, and went to war. He was twenty-two and a cryptographer of genius. In "Between silk and cyanide", his critically acclaimed account of his time in SOE, Marks tells how he revolutionized the code-making techniques of the Allies, trained some of the most famous agents, who dropped into France including Violette Szabo and 'the White Rabbit', and why he wrote haunting verses including his "The Life that I have" poem. He reveals for the first time the disastrous dimensions of the code war between SOE and the Germans in Holland; how the Germans were fooled into thinking a Secret Army was operating in the Fatherland itself; and how and why he broke General de Gaulle's secret code. Both thrilling and Poignant, Marks' book is truly one of the last great Second World War memoirs.

$19.47

Save:$2.04 (9%)

Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 622
Edition: UK ed.
Publisher: Sutton
Published: 01 Oct 2007
ISBN 10: 0750948353
ISBN 13: 9780750948357

Media Reviews

Richard Bernstein

The New York Times

An enthralling book, one full of an eccentric charm as well as fascinating, previously undisclosed details of the secret war waged in the occupied countries.

Martin Scorsese

A mesmerizing account of World War II as fought on the home front in Great Britain by the ingenious codemakers whose work determined the life and death of the Allied agents in occupied Europe. Leo Marks, a brilliant cryptographer, is a masterful and passionate storyteller. I was immediately swept into his secret world of codes and undecipherables, trying at times (without success) to unravel the puzzles myself, and found it difficult to put down the book until the drama had come to an end.

Ken Ringle

The Washington Post

A welcome and powerfully affecting chapter of World War II history, and a very human story of the most clandestine and cerebral art of making war.

The New York Times Book Review

A spellbinding real-life thriller....A compelling insider's view to the shadow war: intrigue and treachery, double-dealing and deception, hope and despair, triumph and tragedy.

The New York Times Book Review

[A] spellbinding real-life thriller....A compelling insider's view to the shadow war: intrigue and treachery, double-dealing and deception, hope and despair, triumph and tragedy.

Author Bio

Leo Marks himself is a legend both as a cryptographer and as a scriptwriter. His most famous work, Peeping Tom, a terrifying thriller about a killer obsessed with photographing the fear on the faces of the beautiful women he is about to murder, is a cult classic of 1960s cinema. He was also the voice of Satan in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.