http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/fivebest/?id=110009367 WSJ.com OpinionJournal FIVE BEST Secret Agent Espionage is a secretive business, but these classics are the best spy stories ever told. BY WILLIAM STEVENSON Saturday, December 9, 2006 12:01 a.m. 1. "The Thirty-Nine Steps" by (John Buchan George H. Doran, 1915). John Buchan set this classic spy story, written on the eve of World War I, in the wild landscape of his native Scotland and in a shadowy London teeming with spies. His main character, Richard Hannay, is warned by a stranger about a brewing political assassination that could plunge Britain into war--and then the man turns up dead in Hannay's flat. Wrongly blamed for murder, Hannay flees to Scotland. The police pursue him, and so do the murderous foreign agents. Buchan (1875-1940), the future Lord Tweedsmuir, governor-general of Canada, wrote several more novels, plunging the superb Hannay into a world of new terrors, but the writer remained true to his respect for the plain folk of his first book--the crofters and landladies who help the hero fight evil by risking all of what little they have. 2. "The Faithful Spy" by Alex Berenson (Random House, 2006). This is a portrait of the spy world foreshadowed by John Buchan--that is to say, our own. CIA agent John Wells is frozen out by his bosses after 9/11 when he shows impatience with their dependency on high technology at the cost of human intelligence. He transforms himself into a Muslim to make his lonely way into the heart of terrorism. Colleagues fear that he has defected, but his girlfriend and immediate superior at the agency, Jennifer, remains steadfast and finally helps Wells to thwart an al Qaeda plot in the U.S. Berenson knows the Arab world thoroughly, and "The Faithful Spy" is a meticulous portrait of the real and horrifying challenges that await us. 3. "I Spy" by Geoffrey Elliott (Little, Brown, 1998). This is the true story of a New York merchant banker who pursued the spy who was his own father: Maj. Kavan Elliott, agent D/M 97 of Britain's Special Operations Executive in World War II. What happened to Kavan, who disappeared at the end of the war, mystified the son. Fifty years later, Geoffrey Elliott had gathered the means to fund his own investigation. Good intelligence can come in a blink of recognition; for Elliott, it was the memory that when Jewish relatives fled Russian pogroms early in the century and started a tobacco business in London, they called it Balkan Sobranie. Elliott went to the Balkans, where he discovered a photo of his father being interrogated by the fascists. I loved this gracefully written account of a son who spied out the truth about his father. 4. "The Last of the Just" by Andri Schwarz-Bart (Atheneum, 1960). Andri Schwarz-Bart spied on German occupiers as a teenage member of the French Resistance in World War II. But perhaps his most fascinating sleuthing effort was his research for "The Last of the Just," a novel that spans eight centuries and concerns the Jewish teaching that the fate of the world lies with 36 "just men" who bear the world's pains. If one generation lacks enough just men, then all of humanity will be poisoned with suffering. Schwarz-Bart, who died in September at the age of 78, brought all the tools of the spy trade to searching for facts--some hidden, some buried in documents--about his "people of interest": the Levy family, beginning with the execution of an ancestor in 12th-century York, England. This immensely moving tale culminates in the story of a schoolboy, Ernie, the last in the Levy line and one of the just men. He was executed at Auschwitz. 5. "Secret Service" by Elizabeth Sparrow (Boydell, 1999). As Elizabeth Sparrow trawled through European archives for her carefully researched "Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792-1815," she was often asked if she had yet found the records for the Scarlet Pimpernel, the aristocratic British spy made famous in a 1905 novel by Baroness Orczy. Ms. Sparrow, a seasoned veteran on intelligence matters, discovered that not just one spy but a multitude of British agents carried a tiny three-cornered token, hand-painted with red pimpernel flowers, that identified royalist agents during the French Revolution. They were part of a spy service launched by Britain to reach beyond existing domestic information-gathering systems. Ms. Sparrow's unearthing of previously unknown documents makes this essential, and lively, reading on the subject. Mr. Stevenson's latest book, "Spymistress: The Secret Life of Vera Atkins," will be published by Arcade in January. Copyright ) 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.