My Top 10 Favorite Spy Series of the 60s/70s

The following column originally appeared in Justin Marriott's PAPERBACK FANATIC #50 (sadly the final edition of this fine publication), which was published in August of 2025. You can buy a copy of it HERE. That article has been slightly expanded upon for this blog.

Anyone who knows me or has been following my columns here in Paperback Fanatic knows that I have a real soft spot for spy thrillers. While I can certainly appreciate the cerebral rewards of reading some John le Carré or Graham Greene, my tastes have always drifted toward the more visceral and action-oriented end of the fiction spectrum. Cold war in the shadows is fine (and well represented by my top pick), but give me a megalomaniac bent on world domination if possible with a little sci-fi thrown into the mix and I’m in like Flint (pun intended).

With all that said, here is your manly man’s guide to my personal favorite picks for top 10 best spy series of the 60s and 70s, the eras when this kind of paperback was truly king. I will do these in reverse order leading up to my number one pick. But choose a title from any of these listed and I think you’ll be in for a cracking good time.

10) Mark Hood series by James Dark (J.E. Macdonnell)

Mark Hood is the top American agent for Intertrust, a multi-national spy agency made up of the 4 major nuclear powers of the time. Intertrust’s main goal is to address and prevent nuclear destruction and annihilation. Hood is quite the amalgam; a rich playboy with a naval military record, he’s also a pro cricket player, race car driver, and a karate champion. 

Hood’s adventures take him all over the globe in adventures that are clearly inspired by not only the James Bond films, but seem to be even more in line with the outlandish Euro-spy adventures of the Bond clones that proliferated during the 60s. These low-budget movies were designed for less discerning viewers happy to see anyone in a tux destroy villain lairs in preposterous and unlikely ways. And each of the Mark Hood adventures follows suit, usually with varying degrees of sci-fi teased into the mix. The prose is clean and efficient and Hood makes for a good cypher for the readers’ wish fulfillment dreams of superspydom.

9) John Craig series by James Munro (James Mitchell)

While author James Mitchell would find his biggest fame as the creator of the Callan books and UK television series, he first tested the espionage waters with a quartet of books based on government assassin John Craig of Department K, a subsection of Britain’s MI6. Craig’s adventures are violent, grounded more in reality than fantasy, and he remains taciturn and cynical throughout, despising his handler, Loomis, and what he’s expected to do for Department K. 

He’s also a karate and judo expert and there’s clearly some genuine knowledge of these martial arts on display as Craig gets in frequent scraps. Overall, the books are solid and can be read in any order, although there is clear character arc for Craig and his cynicism grows along with his drinking as a means of coping with the job he’s expected to perform for Her Majesty.

8) Jason Love series by James Leasor

Doctor Jason Love earns his place on my list first and foremost due to the  eccentricities of his character. A country doctor in a quiet British village, Love is a collector and aficionado of classic Cord automobiles and a lover of adventure, which plays heavily into his decision to respond positively when approached by MI6. 

In the first book, Passport to Oblivion, the intelligence service needs a doctor to attend a medical conference in Tehran and aid in their efforts to determine whether their Iranian-based operation has been compromised by the Russians after one of their agents is killed on assignment there. This sets up a constant throughout the series, with Love being a fish out of water amateur almost always in over his head without fully realizing it. This keeps the adventures light and breezy, with Love being a source of humor despite being in plenty of constant international danger. An unexpectedly high level of suspense is consistently generated, due in large part to Love’s ingenuity thanks to his lack of genuine spy-craft training.

7) Commander Shaw series by Philip McCutchan

Philip McCutchan was a highly prolific writer for decades, churning out several unrelated series and paying particular attention to naval adventures for much of his career. However, for this list I’m calling out his 22-book series focused on former British Naval Commander Esmonde Shaw (only the first 10 covers are featured here). These adventures spanned several decades with the earlier ones drawing critical acclaim touting McCutchan as the successor to Ian Fleming, and it’s easy to understand why. 

Shaw is a cool and collected professional in books that primarily focus on his battles against Russians and Red Chinese before a shift occurs coinciding with the success of the Bond film series. This shift moves Commander Shaw into 6D2, a shadowy division of British Intelligence that now sends him on far more fantastic missions against megalomaniacs and their sci-fi-flavored plans for world domination. Later books see Shaw joined by a partner, Felicity Mandrake, who brings an Emma Peele-like dynamic to counter the aging Shaw’s equivalent to John Steed. All in all, a fun, very competently written series.

6) Jonas Wilde series by Andrew York (Christopher Nicole)

Andrew York was one of many pseudonyms utilized by Christopher Nicole, who authored over 200 novels during his lifetime, several of them in ongoing espionage series. I have dabbled in these other series but for my money the best of them is centered upon Jonas Wilde, an assassin for the aptly-titled British Elimination Squad. One of Wilde’s more unique qualifiers for this position is his insistence on killing with his hands versus guns or knives. In fact, in his past prior to the start of the first book in the series, Wilde has accomplished over 25 confirmed kills for the BES. 

Throughout the series, Nicole loves to go against expectation and provide genuinely surprising plot twists involving double agents, terrorists, questionable bosses, and femmes fatale at every turn. He’s also not afraid to throw some really surprising elements into his plots, like cryogenics and religious cults, and somehow makes it all work splendidly through sheer literary talent and propulsive plotting.

5) Sam Durrell series by Edward S. Aarons

Edward S. Aarons was a very prolific writer even beyond the Sam Durrell series, which ran for 42 installments by him, and another 6 by his son, Will (although some would claim these last few were given a house name). Regardless, Durrell, a CIA agent codenamed The Cajun, is an enduring figure in the annals of espionage fiction, from his early 1950s adventures that hew much more closely to detective fiction with a national security interest, to full blown international spy intrigue for the majority of the run. 

There was a formula at work in most of these, but Aarons’ prose is so smooth and effortless that readers gladly accommodate the formula for the sake of the fun to be had. Durrell gets his assignment, which causes him to travel overseas. There’s a girl mixed up in the mission, the villains are hate-worthy adversaries of the USA in dire need of a violent comeuppance, and the action is tempered with genuine suspense. At whatever point you dive into the series, you go in knowing there are dozens and dozens of adventures, so there’s never really a question as to Durrell’s success, but again, Aarons is so effective at setting the stage and pace, that you just go along for the ride, which is rich and rewarding. There’s a reason so many were published over the decades—they’re just flat out entertaining. I have only included a handful of the various covers from over the decades in this post.

4) Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton

If your only reference point for Matt Helm is the 60s spy spoof movies starring Dean Martin, then simply put, you know nothing about Matt Helm. Written in terse first-person prose by Donald Hamilton, the series is considered by many to be the best espionage series ever written featuring a US-based agent. In fact, they were marketed in the 60s and 70s with a blurb on the front cover that proclaimed that Helm was “America’s James Bond,” and that’s not too far off the mark. 

The main distinction is that Helm is a blue-collar everyman, though highly proficient at what he does, which usually includes the use of a long-distance rifle. He is coldly sarcastic, but hard-edged and cynical, preferring to be used as a weapon to kill whomever he is directed to eliminate. In this regard, he’s a real bastard, indifferent and prone to sudden violence. There are women in his adventures, yet Helm is not so much a ladies’ man as he is skilled at using and manipulating women to achieve his goals. A total of 28 books, 4 movies, and even a short-lived television show featured Matt Helm. But he only really lives and breathes on the printed page, especially in the first dozen or so outstanding entries, which are top-drawer by anyone’s measure (I have included some of my favorite covers here).

3) Modesty Blaise series by Peter O’Donnell

I was late to the party where Modesty Blaise is concerned. I had known about the books and comics for decades before stumbling across a cache of British paperbacks in the early 2000s. I snatched them all up and then sat on them for a few years before finally opening one. I proceeded to acquire and read them all within the next year. To put it simply, I fell in love with Modesty, her background, her style, and her partner, the knife-wielding Willie Garvin. 

Modesty is a product of her 60s setting, a former criminal and thief who is independently wealthy, a fashion maven, a martial arts master, and a freelance problem solver for Her Majesty’s government. She is a sexually liberated woman who is as casual with her sexual favors as any of the era’s manly superspies, but never drifting into explicit detail (this is not The Baroness, a hardcore spy-fi rip off of Modesty). At no point is Modesty Blaise a source of parody or spoof. She’s a deadly professional who kicks ass with the best of the bunch and isn’t above a full-frontal assault on a villain’s lair with Willie by her side, tossing grenades and firing machine guns. 

Modesty started life as a Peter O’Donnell penned comic strip that grew in popularity to the point where a prose series simply made good publishing sense, and we are all the better for it. Her adventures are fast-paced, ingenious in their set-up, and the villains are diabolical and slightly over the top. O’Donnell excels at creating seemingly impossible-to-escape situations that Modesty approaches with such skill and ingenuity that it leaves the reader with a big grin of satisfaction. With a total of 13 books, novellas and short story collections, and a long-running comic strip (88 issues!), there is much available to satisfy the Modesty Blaise itch once it is fully set. Highest recommendations!

2) James Bond series by Ian Fleming

No list of spy series from the era of James Bond would be complete without the inclusion of James Bond himself, Ian Fleming’s hugely successful and even more hugely influential international secret agent for MI6. You know the movies, but if you haven’t gone back to the source material, it deserves your attention. Though not a literary heavyweight, Fleming caught lightning in a bottle with adventures that kept one foot in the realistic cold war of the 50s and 60s, while planting the other foot firmly in outlandish missions featuring over the top villains and complicated plots for world domination and occasionally revenge. 

I don’t think there’s anything I can add to the history of this landmark in espionage fiction (14 original novels by Fleming and a plethora of official continuations by several noteworthy authors). Fleming’s influence would fundamentally change the world of spy fiction forever (some could argue for the better, and some for the worse). I recently re-read several of the Bond books and gained a whole new appreciation for the fact that they genuinely did something new that had never been done before. To quote the theme song from the movie version of The Spy Who Loved Me, nobody does it better. Well, except for one...

1) Quiller series by Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor)

British author Elleston Trevor wrote under a variety of different names. As Adam Hall, Trevor gave us what I consider to be the finest example of series-based espionage fiction ever written. Quiller relays his clandestine mission adventures in clipped first-person narrative. He is a dedicated agent who refuses to carry a gun in the belief that guns make people overconfident and careless. He’s addicted to the rush of being on a mission, sometimes waiting at the cafeteria of The Bureau, a top-secret division of British Intelligence, simply wanting to be there the instant a new mission becomes available. Quiller refers to these missions as being a ferret put down the hole, an agent in the dark on the run engaging with foreign agents out to kill him, and in constant threat of being found, imprisoned, and tortured to talk. 

Torture is something that Quiller tells us is impossible to outlast in the long run; eventually everyone breaks. That’s why tearing one’s wrists open with the teeth is always a possibility. Quiller’s inner thoughts are often rendered as extended stream of consciousness musings in real time, even down to being part of the agent’s “in the moment” thought process for a plan of action combined with gauging the various likely outcomes. And the world-building and tangible spy-craft is exemplary and totally believable across all 19 books in the series. Everything about Quiller's world is fully fleshed out and consistently and tangibly believable. And the tension and suspense is out of this world. These books are the very essence of what a "thriller" is supposed to be. That ongoing and constant suspense factor is something genuinely lacking in far too many attempts at these kinds of "agent in the mission field" espionage. Quiller is for me, quite simply the best of the best!

Reviews by Steve Carroll