I’m an unashamed fan of spy novels, though if I had to make a stand, my heart belongs to the Cold War. One suspects that, if the Cold War didn’t exist, a novelist would have had to invent it. It lends itself perfectly to the murky, grey world of spies in a way no other period does.

Here are three novels that, in one way or the other, helped shape some of my own fiction:

The Warsaw Document by Adam Hall

I am huge fan of the Quiller novels by Adam Hall (working name of Elleston Trevor) and The Warsaw Document is perhaps my favourite, existing for many years as a beat-up paperback in my collection. Quiller is a reluctant agent working for the Bureau, the most secretive branch of British Intelligence. He has to be coaxed into going on missions, sent near-blind into situations he needs to unravel as he goes along. Hall starts chapters in the middle of the action, then jumping back to the earlier situation, and he uses run-on sentences to evoke a sense of on-going action, a fluidity of movement that makes it hard to let go. I love how The Warsaw Document starts with a tense close-contact fight that stops when “somebody turned on the light”. Quiller is in training – but is soon sent out into a classic Cold War scenario, a Soviet Warsaw in the midst of winter.

“The deadline was close and I knew now what London had sent me out here to do: define, infiltrate and destroy. And I couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the programme Moscow was running. I'd have to get inside and blow it up from there.”

I think it’s the chill that does it for me, the cold of winter. Occasionally Quiller goes south, into warmer climes, but I think it’s the winter of the Cold War that really sinks deep into the heart. I paid homage to Adam Hall, and Quiller, in my early novella An Occupation of Angels (2005), which is dedicated to both the author and his creation.