The Secret Agent
Adolf Verloc keeps a shabby shop in Soho, informs on the anarchists who meet in his back room, and is told by the embassy paying him to produce an outrage against science — the Greenwich Observatory. His wife Winnie married him for the sake of her simple-minded younger brother, and keeps house without curiosity about what her husband does. Conrad took the plot from the Greenwich bombing of 1894 and wrote his one London novel as flat, sardonic comedy laid over a domestic catastrophe.
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