The Venetian Affair
by Helen MacInnes
5 October 2026
I’d had Helen MacInnes - who wrote spy novels from the 1940s to the 1980s - on my list of authors to look out for for a while before I came across this tattered copy in a second hand bookshop. It looked as if it might smell of cigarette smoke but when I opened it there was a chocolately aroma to it. A little disconcerting but vaguely pleasant. This was published in 1963 and my edition was printed a decade later. Some books from the 1960s have the best covers and some have the worst. Perhaps it’s just how things look after time has passed but while there are a lot of mediocre modern covers when it comes to old ones there never seems to be a lot of middle ground. This is definitely a terrible one in my eye.
The book starts out with a plane arriving in Paris from New York - it’s 1961 - and two men get their raincoats muddled up. One of them is a spy and the other is Bill Fenner, an American journalist currently working as a drama critic. I felt there were shades of Eric Ambler here with an ordinary guy getting accidentally involved in something secret service-ish; Ambler and MacInnes were pretty much contemporaries. Though Fenner’s a different class to Ambler’s characters who I remember being down on their luck reprobates usually. I definitely found the plot harder to follow than Ambler’s as well. In the beginning in Paris I could have done with a spreadsheet to keep the different characters straight. I was definitely missing things due to not remembering who was who. Once the book gets to Venice in the second half things became easier to follow though I still found a lot of the plot details a bit muddy.
The ending came very suddenly and in an easily foreseeable manner. It was both welcome and kind of disappointing. I find myself very much on the fence about how much I enjoyed the book. There were a lot of descriptions and details to savour but I could barely tell you now what the overall plot was actually about other than in very generic Cold War terms. If I were to read another of MacInnes’s books - and I won’t rule it out - then I’d probably pick an earlier one to see how her take on the Second World War compares to the Cold War.
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