Joe Wilderness is the protagonist of John Lawton’s Cold War espionage series. A far cry from the gentleman spies of fiction, Wilderness comes from poverty in London’s East End and learned to survive by his wits long before intelligence work found him.
During the Blitz, young Wilderness made his living as a thief, breaking into bombed buildings to steal whatever he could sell. This background gave him skills that proved useful when British intelligence recruited him: he knows how to operate in shadows, read people, and look out for himself. His fluency in German and Russian made him valuable for operations in divided Berlin.
Wilderness is not motivated by patriotism or ideology. He works for whoever pays and always keeps an eye on his own advantage. This makes him effective but unpredictable, and his handlers never fully trust him. The series follows his career through the most tense years of the Cold War, from the Berlin Tunnel operation through the prisoner exchanges at Checkpoint Charlie.
Read the Joe Wilderness series in order.