Harris, Robert

(British, 1957– )

Harris was a television reporter for the BBC and a political journalist with the Observer and Sunday Times before his transformation into best-selling author. Taking a rather hackneyed plot (an alternative world history in which Hitler won the war), Harris turned it into a tense thriller, Fatherland (1992), which works because he employs his journalistic skills to create a plausible Nazi Berlin of 1964. Although Enigma (1995) is a more conventional espionage story about a brilliant young codebreaker at Bletchley Park (a real wartime location) trying to crack the German Enigma code, it gains from having more rounded characters and a touching love-story. Archangel (1998) deals with a historian's dangerous search for Stalin's hidden diaries.

John Buchan, Eric Ambler, John le Carré. See SPY  TH