Between Silk and Cyanide

In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 Charing Cross Road, and went to war. He was twenty-two and a cryptographer of genius. This book is an account of his time in SOE. It tells how he revolutionized the code-making techniques of the Allies and trained some of the famous agents.

"The New York Times Book Review"

[A] spellbinding real-life thriller....A compelling insider's view to the shadow war: intrigue and treachery, double-dealing and deception, hope and despair, triumph and tragedy.

"The New York Times Book Review"

ÝA¨ spellbinding real-life thriller....A compelling insider's view to the shadow war: intrigue and treachery, double-dealing and deception, hope and despair, triumph and tragedy.

Ken Ringle

"The Washington Post"

A welcome and powerfully affecting chapter of World War II history, and a very human story of the most clandestine and cerebral art of making war.

Martin Scorsese

A mesmerizing account of World War II as fought on the home front in Great Britain by the ingenious codemakers whose work determined the life and death of the Allied agents in occupied Europe. Leo Marks, a brilliant cryptographer, is a masterful and passionate storyteller. I was immediately swept into his secret world of codes and "undecipherables," trying at times (without success) to unravel the puzzles myself, and found it difficult to put down the book until the drama had come to an end.

Richard Bernstein

"The New York Times"

An enthralling book, one full of an eccentric charm as well as fascinating, previously undisclosed details of the secret war waged in the occupied countries.

Leo Marks himself is a legend both as a cryptographer and as a scriptwriter. His most famous work, Peeping Tom, a terrifying thriller about a killer obsessed with photographing the fear on the faces of the beautiful women he is about to murder, is a cult classic of 1960s cinema. He was also the voice of Satan in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.

In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 Charing Cross Road, and went to war. He was twenty-two and a cryptographer of genius. This book is an account of his time in SOE. It tells how he revolutionized the code-making techniques of the Allies and trained some of the famous agents.

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