The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent is a novel by the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, published in book form in September 1907 after being serialised in 1905 and 1906.

The book is set in Soho in 1886 and dedicated to H. G. Wells, and it belongs to the later part of Conrad's career, when he had stopped writing about the sea and started writing about politics. Verloc's household is the novel's real subject: his wife Winnie married him for the security he could offer her mother and her brother Stevie, a young man with an intellectual disability whom Verloc uses, without much thought, as the instrument of the plot. Conrad is unsentimental about everyone in the book, including the police and the anarchists who talk about changing society and do nothing, and the grimness of the London he describes owes something to Dickens's Bleak House. The novel has been adapted many times for stage, film, radio and opera, and it became one of the literary works most cited by the American press in the weeks after the attacks of 11 September 2001, because the theme of terrorism in an ordinary city turned out to be the part of it that readers recognised.