The Unquiet Sleep

(CC) Photo: Clayton Evans
William Haggard on the back cover of The Conspirators, 1967

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The Unquiet Sleep is a 1962 suspense novel by the British author William Haggard published in England by Cassell and in the United States by Ives Washburn. It was Haggard's fourth of 21 books involving his protagonist Colonel Charles Russell, the head of the unobtrusive but lethal Security Executive, a government counter-intelligence agency, where he moves easily and gracefully along C.P. Snow's Corridors of Power. Like all of Haggard's books it has standard elements of suspense thrillers

Plot

Protagonist is perhaps too strong a word to describe Colonel Russell. As Haggard himself wrote about his fiction:

My novels are chiefly novels of suspense with a background of international politics. A Colonel Charles Russell of the Security Executive, a not entirely imaginary British counter-espionage organization, while not a protagonist in the technical sense, holds the story line together in the background by his operations, while the characters in the foreground carry the action."

Reception and/or Appraisal

Reviews were mixed:

xxxx.

The New York Times: xxxxx .

Anthony Cronin, Times Literary Supplement, date unknown: xxxxx

Kirkus Reviews: xxxxx