FIVE BEST I Spy . . . My favorite tales of espionage.

BY CHARLES MCCARRY Saturday, February 4, 2006 12:01 a.m.

1. "A Coffin for Dimitrios" by Eric Ambler (Knopf, 1939).

Arguably the most expertly crafted pure thriller ever written. Dimitrios, a scoundrel à toute faire who operates in the dark corners of the recently expired Ottoman Empire, is pronounced dead in the first chapter. Ambler spends the rest of the narrative bringing him back to life through the bumbling investigations of a naive English writer of detective stories who somehow lives to see the slippery Dimitrios laid out in lavender. A brilliant set piece on the identification, seduction and ultimate betrayal of an unwitting and unwilling agent is, like the rest of the book, a textbook example of the heartless way in which spies make use of fools.

2. "The Manchurian Candidate" by Richard Condon (McGraw-Hill, 1959).

When it comes to the outrageous situation that has the crystal ring of truth, Condon is without peer. In this parable on McCarthyism and the soft spots in American democracy, he creates in his protagonist, Raymond Shaw, one of the most pitiable villains in the history of literature. Raymond, the victim (literally) of an Oedipal relationship with a powerful political mother, is captured by the Chinese while fighting with an infantry unit in Korea. He is transformed into the perfect assassin by an origami-making wizard of operant conditioning and then sent back to his sinister handler in the U.S. Raymond's journey to his inevitable tragic end is both a comic tour de force and a morality tale that is gorgeously outside the box every step of the way.

3. "The Polish Officer" by Alan Furst (Random House, 1995).

Like Condon, Furst writes about espionage from the outside and manages to create a compelling version of a twisted world in which good men do bad things in the name of a foul cause. Where Condon relied on a fabulous imagination, Furst is a prodigious researcher, and in his fiction he has done for interwar European espionage what the blind historian W.H. Prescott, who had never been there either, did for Peru--that is to say, made palpable a vanished time and place and its political mood swings. "The Polish Officer" is the novel in which Furst hit his stride, and like his other books, it is a dazzling commentary on fate--how the unanticipated leads to the inevitable by way of the unavoidable.

4. "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling (Doubleday, 1901).

The ur-novel of the genre, and an incomparable intelligence report on the subject of an entire culture. On the day that we met, my first teacher in the CIA recommended that I re-read this book, and I did so with profit. I did not, however, really understand why he had made the suggestion until 50 years later, when with the assistance of my memories I listened to the actor Sam Dastor's magnificent reading of it on audiotape. Kim's travels in the company of his holy man, the train of coincidence by which he enters the employ of the Ethnological Survey, the verisimilitude of his operational life and the antic charm of his colleagues and adversaries make a matchless guide to the Raj and the Great Game at their zenith.

5. "Ashenden" by W. Somerset Maugham (Doubleday, 1928).

This is not a novel but a series of short stories, written in a single voice, that provide all the pleasures of walking into a room in which a dozen of John Singer Sargent's portraits are hanging. Each picture tells you all you need to know about its subject, and all of them, taken together, tell you more than you ever expected to know about their world. Maugham, a greater and more original writer than is usually admitted, was criticized during his lifetime for reporting too accurately on the actual people and happenings that formed the basis of his fiction. Clearly he was up to his old tricks in these tales, based on his experiences as a British deep-cover agent in Switzerland and Kerensky's Russia and elsewhere during World War I. Sadly, some of what he revealed about his undercover life is permanently lost: On reading the manuscript, Winston Churchill is said to have advised Maugham to burn several of the stories on grounds that they put him in hazard of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

Mr. McCarry's most recent novel, "Old Boys," was published in 2004 by Overlook, which is in the process of reissuing his nine earlier books.