The Scholars of Night
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Average rating4.8
John M. Ford's The Scholars of Night is an extraordinary novel of technological espionage and human betrayal, weaving past and present into a web of unbearable suspense. Nicholas Hansard is a brilliant historian at a small New England college. He specializes in Christopher Marlowe. But Hansard has a second, secret, career with The White Group, a “consulting agency” with shadowy government connections. There, he is a genius at teasing secrets out of documents old and new—to call him a code-breaker is an understatement. When Hansard’s work exposes one of his closest friends as a Russian agent, and the friend then dies mysteriously, the connections seem all too clear. Shaken, Hansard turns away from his secret work to lose himself in an ancient Marlowe manuscript. Surely, a lost 400 year old play is different enough from modern murder. He is very, very wrong.
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The Scholars of Night by John M. Ford
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If I were more of an aficionado of the spy genre, I would probably have given this four stars. There seemed to be some improbable plot developments, but, on the whole, in most spy action stories, these kinds of improbabilities occur.
I really liked this story despite these improbabilities (and despite a plot twist that could be spotted miles away from the reveal.) Undoubtedly I found the main character a Diplomacy-playing history professor to be empathetic, probably because in law school, I played Diplomacy and I was a history major in college.
The story's protagonist is Nicholas Hansard. Hansard is a history professor who moonlights as a consultant for a mysterious intelligence service named the “White Group.” In the course of one investigation, he unmasks his beloved mentor as a Soviet agent.
It is important to keep in mind that this book was written in 1988. At that time, the Cold War was going strong and the Soviet Union was still in business. The story communicates the sensibilities of a time now lost to history.
Hansard is talked into doing another job for the White Group, namely verifying the provenance of a newly-discovered play by Christopher Marlow. In the course of this job, Hansard stumbles into a parallel mystery involving a plot to trigger World War III by stealing a piece of Cold War high technology.
I enjoyed the historical angle and watching Hansard go through his intellectual paces as he attempts to figure out the Marlow mystery. He is almost brought into the modern spy mystery by accident and the final part of the book seems more James Bond than George Smiley. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the story throughout the whole thing.
