Legends

1993: THE CONDEMNED MAN CATCHES A GLIMPSE OF THE ELEPHANT
THEY HAD FINALLY GOTTEN AROUND TO PAVING THE SEVEN kilometers of dirt spur connecting the village of Prigorodnaia to the four-lane Moscow-Petersburg highway. The local priest, surfacing from a week-long binge, lit beeswax tapers to Innocent of Irkutsk, the saint who in the 1720s had repaired the road to China and was now about to bring civilization to Prigorodnaia in the form of a ribbon of macadam with a freshly painted white stripe down the middle.

The peasants, who had a shrewder idea of how Mother Russia functioned, thought it more likely that this evidence of progress, if that was the correct name for it, was somehow related to the purchase, several months earlier, of the late and little lamented Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria's sprawling wooden dacha by a man identified only as the Oligarkh . Next to nothing was known about him. He came and went at odd hours in a glistening black Mercedes S-600 sedan, his shock of silver hair and dark glasses a fleeting apparition behind its tinted windows. A local woman hired to do laundry was said to have seen him angrily flick cigar ashes from the crow's-nest rising like a turret from the dacha before turning back to issue instructions to someone. The woman, who was terrified of the dacha's newfangled electric washing machine and scrubbed the laundry in a shallow reach of the river, had been too far away to make out more than a few words- "Buried, that's what I want, but alive . . ."-but they and the ' Oligarkh 's feral tone had dispatched a chill down her spine that made her shudder every time she recounted the story.

Two peasants cutting firewood on the other side of the river had caught a glimpse of the Oligarkh from a distance, struggling on aluminum crutches along the path behind his dacha that led to the dilapidated paper factory disgorging dirty white smoke from its giant stacks fourteen hours a day, six days a week, and beyond that to the village cemetery

Robert Littell gilt als Meister des amerikanischen Spionageromans. Sein Buch »Die kalte Legende« wurde von der Presse als »einer der besten Agententhriller, die je geschrieben wurden« bezeichnet, und steht ganz in der Tradition von John le Carré. Er erhielt dafür den Deutschen Krimipreis 2007 in der Kategorie »Internationale Krimis«. Bevor er sich dem Schreiben zuwandte, arbeitete der Autor als Newsweek-Korrespondent im Nahen Osten. Der Autor lebt heute in Frankreich.

"Now and then novels come along of such originality and power that they blow me away. .. .[Legends] makes it blazingly clear that Littell's is one of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today." -The Washington Post
" Legends solidifies Mr. Littell's position among the pantheon of great espionage writers." - Otto Penzler, The New York Sun

"Robert Littell's convincing spy story is brimming with great characters." - New York Post