In a rough-and-ready shop in Soho in Victorian London, Mr. Verloc lives a humble existence sustaining himself, his wife, her infirm mother, and her disabled brother, Stevie. But all is not as it seems with Mr. Verloc, a secret agent in the employ of a foreign government.HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-inlaw. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practicallynone at all before the evening. Mr Verloc cared but little about his ostensiblebusiness. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses whichexisted in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shopwas a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the doorremained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescriptpackages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comicpublications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of blackwood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting atimpropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titleslike The Torch, The Gong-rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were alwaysturned low, either for economy's sake or for the sake of the customers
Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be 'a simple tale' proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.
The book tells the story of Mr. Adolf Verloc and his work as a spy against Britain. Verloc is a businessman who owns a shop which sells pornographic material, contraceptives and bric-a-brac. His friends are a group of anarchists of which Comrade Ossipon, Michaelis, and "The Professor" are the most prominent. The group produces anarchist literature in the form of pamphlets entitled F.P. – The Future of the Proletariat. Although a member of an anarchist cell, Verloc is also secretly employed by the embassy of a foreign country, but Mr. Vladimir, the new First Secretary in the Embassy is not satisfied with Verloc's contribution. In order to redeem himself, Verloc must carry out an operation – the destruction of Greenwich Observatory by a bomb.
The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale is a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1907.The story is set in London in 1886 and deals with Mr Adolf Verloc and his work as a spy for an unnamed country (presumably Russia).It is notable for being one of Conrad's later political novels in which he moved away from his former tales of seafaring.
Noted British author and anthropologist Joseph Conrad's famous novel 'The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale' was first published in the year 1907. The novel is set in London. It revolves around the work of a spy for a country left unnamed in the novel.
Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law. The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.
Joseph Conrad published The Secret Agent in 1907 and the work is often taken to be the major work in a trilogy of political works that Conrad published around this time (the other two are Nostromo and Under Western Eyes). The book is also taken to be Conrad's greatest metropolitan novel and makes use both of Continental and English writing styles. The Secret Agent is one of the first spy novels and is written in such a way as to require great attention on the part of the reader to make sense of the plot developments that occur (Simmons and Stape, viii).
Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-inlaw. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practicallynone at all before the evening. Mr Verloc cared but little about his ostensiblebusiness. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses whichexisted in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shopwas a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the doorremained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescriptpackages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comicpublications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of blackwood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting atimpropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titleslike The Torch, The Gong-rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were alwaysturned low, either for economy's sake or for the sake of the customers
