Made it into the Archives!

If you haven’t yet encountered it – or perhaps you just brushed past it – Spy Guys + Gals is an amazing web resource. It’s a compendium of fictional spies that have appeared in series of at least two works, collated and ranked by a true fan (and sometime doyen of the secret world) Randall Masteller.

At the last count, this real world Connie Sachs or Molly Doran had amassed information on “2,947 series covering 15,886 books (as well as 616 movies, 9309 television episodes, and 14,123 other things)”. And the Chasing Mercury books are in there! And he has kindly allowed me to quote from his remarks thereunder:

“Most series I have entered into this compendium are pretty easy to understand and to sum up. Bad guys doing bad things need stopping. Good guys pick a particular person, be it man or woman, and tell him/her to go stop those bad guys and we get to go along for the ride.

This is quite a bit different. Most of the time I spent reading this series, I was as wonderfully ignorant of the ‘big picture’ as Bradley was. Now, normally when I am kept in the dark with a series, I am annoyed. Not here, though. In these books, the author, Paul Phillips, keeps the reader fully aware of what is going on, as far as Bradley knows, or really wants to know. And that was the key to my enjoying them.

I liked the times we get to follow Mila, as deadly and spooky as she can be. I really liked when I got to hang out with Bradley because he is a fascinatingly ‘normal’ guy.

I really like the writing style of the author. The stories flew by and I flew along with them.”

It’s an honour to be listed among so many, so much more accomplished works of spy fiction, let alone to be ranked so highly. I urge you to dip into SpyGuysAndGirls.com – as I will be doing frequently.

P.S. News of a new publication coming next month. Watch this space!