Red Anger (1975) by Geoffrey Household

Evading the KGB and CIA via train, boat, and side-saddle

Readers unfamiliar with Red Anger may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.

Red Anger is a must-read for those who enjoy John Buchan, Dornford Yates, and David Morrell. 

My only hesitation with the novel was my own initial confusion, caused by the two protagonists being surnamed Adrian Gurney and Alwyn Rory. That was just too fine a distinction for eyes and ears and brain initially to grasp.

Adrian is our young narrator, and his picaresque tale of a falling out with a shady employer, the decision to fake his own death, his return to the UK as a Romanian defector, fills up the first third of the novel with a lot of spy versus spy hijinks. Naturally, Adrian falls afoul of every security service in Europe except MI5 with his scam. In London he is reluctantly recruited as a contract agent for the Romanian security services. They want to know the whereabouts of presumed defector Alwyn Rory so as to trump their KGB bête noires.  

Alwyn is assumed by MI5 to already be living in Moscow. 

But as Adrian retraces Alwyn's biography, he is led to American Eudora Hilliard, who raised Alwyn. Eudora was a Stalinist activist during the Spanish Civil War, now retired to South Devon at a house called Cleder’s Priory in the village of Molesworthy. Eudora Hilliard is the dynamo that energizes Adrian and Red Anger itself.