The series that I am going to recommend here may interest those who like spy novels or military history of the years covering WWII and the Cold war.
The Dr David Audley series is a series of espionage thriller novels written by the well-known British novelist named Anthony Price.
It is comprised of 19 books in total, which were released between the year 1970 and 1989. The series is also known by the name Dr David Audley and Colonel Jack Butler, based on the names of its two main characters. The novel stand the test of time.
To my knowledge, Anthony Price is still alive but he developed RSI and gave up writing after his last novel. The series went out of print but has recently been republished.
The following are excepts from several sources.
Each and every novel of this thriller series focuses on a working of a counterintelligence team of agents, who are part of an organization similar to MI5. The agents are shown as referring obscurely to their employer as the Defense Ministry. In the later parts of the series, it becomes absolutely clear that the specific department of the counter intelligence group is like MI5. It is also learned with the progress of the novel series that the budget of the secret agency is kept hidden under the tab of Research & Development.
The first head of the agency is depicted as Sir Frederick Clinton, who is replaced midway of the suspense series by Col. Jack Butler. The agency has its best agent in the role of David Audley. He is a former historian and currently working as a spy. David is well known for making use of unorthodox tactics, his historical interests, and his liking for the quotes of Kipling.
Each of the novels feature David Audley as the main lead. However, the author has not regarded him as the point of view characters for all the books. In the debut novel, David comes across his future wife and is seen as the central character. But, several other operatives get introduced in the later books and have a central plot of their own. They include Jack Butler, Hugh Roskill, Paul Mitchell, etc. Enmities and rivalries do exist within the agents of the department.
Author Price has gone one step ahead from the typical espionage thrillers by describing the stories through the viewpoint of the ones who dislike or oppose David Audley. The spy service described by Price appears to be belonging to the recent Britain, unlike the other spy thrillers. The stories also feature female agents in active roles. A couple of them include Elizabeth Loftus and Frances Fitzgibbon. The series also features repeated appearances from the Russian opponent of David Audley, named Professor Panin.
The novels mostly traverse in real time. The characters are shown changing and evolving with each book. And between the debut novel and the last one, it is depicted that a period of 20 years has passed. Several titled are also shown cutting away from the timeline by depicting the exploits from the youths of Butler and Audley around the World War II. An important feature of all the plots is that all of them relate to a few important historical military events somehow. Most of them typically contain strong elements of archaeology.
A television series adapted from the first 3 books of the series was Broadcast on the British television in 1983. This series is called Chessgame, which was a 6 part television show. The TV series was shown again in 1986 in the form of 3 different TV movies. In the TV series, the characters of Roskill and Audley are given the main roles, while Butler’s character has been renamed and replaced to suit the plots of the television movies. The first and fifth books of the book series have been adapted as one-off dramas by the BBC Radio. Martin Jarvis starred in the lead role of Paul Mitchell in one of the dramas.
