The Professor and the Spies: A Novel
By: O.T. Harris With Carl Kremer
Professor Hampton Weatherly became a professor of English history at Westminster, retiring in 1995. He began research for a book on the security measures for that event, which led to a meeting with a Scottish agent of MI5, Clive St. John. They become friends, and Weatherly finds himself in Scotland seeking data on St. John’s father, a decorated naval officer who spied on German and Russian activity in the Orkney Islands during WWII.
The plot bounces from Fulton to Washington, DC, to Scotland and Crimea, with an array of well-drawn characters: bureaucrats, naval admirals, a Scottish provost and his doughty chauffeur, a whiskey salesman, and members of MI5, the FBI, the CIA, the Missouri Highway Patrol, and the Fulton Police Department. Featuring a thwarted assassination attempt, a largely unnoticed homicide, a kidnapping, a daring rescue involving spies and secret agents, Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and others-and drinking, romance, intrigue and dark secrets, The Professor and the Spies is sure to capture the undivided attention of any reader.
About the Authors
O.T. Harris and his brainchild, Professor Hampton Weatherly, were freshmen at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, when Winston Churchill made his Iron Curtain speech there in 1946. When he retired from a career in banking, Harris indulged himself in writing, which had been a life-long pastime. In his eighties, he began his most challenging work, this novel, encouraged and coached by his friend, Carl Kremer, a retired English professor: BA, MA, MFA (in fiction writing), and PhD in English.
O.T. Harris died, his novel unfinished, and Kremer, who had published some essays and short stories and written a half-dozen unpublished novels, undertook the task of finishing and polishing the novel-a three-year challenge and labor of love and frustration as he struggled to realize Harris’s-and his own-dream of being a novelist.
