★★★★★ "I am not infallible."

The Fuller Memorandum

Charles Stross, Gideon Emery (narrator)

Those words are spoken by James Angleton in the course of Charles Stross' The Fuller Memorandum. It's not a good sign!

We have seen Angleton in both The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue (as well as the bonus novellas). His official title is DSS, which supposedly stands for "Detached Special Secretary", but the scuttlebutt among Laundry employees is that it really means "Deeply Scary Sorcerer". We know Angleton as the puppet-master who devises devious schemes to catch bad actors and pulls everyone's strings to make them come out as intended.

We also know, from The Jennifer Morgue, that there is something uncanny about him. In that book we learned that in 1975 Angleton was a UK observer to a US intelligence project. On seeing pictures from that 1975 mission, our hero Bob Howard (a "computational demonologist", which is another way of saying "sorcerer"), who works for Angleton, noted that Angleton in 1975 looked no different -- no younger or older -- than he does in 2010. Furthermore in The Jennifer Morgue Angleton appeared in Bob's dreams to brief him on his mission.

What IS Angleton? ("Angleton" is not his real name. Real names have power, so everyone in the Laundry is known by an alias. Angleton's was chosen to make US intelligence services uneasy -- look up "James Jesus Angleton" for the reference.) In The Fuller Memorandum we find out. Angleton starts up one of his characteristic intricate entanglement schemes, intended to catch a dangerous cult, with Bob as tethered goat. And, because Angleton is not infallible, some very not-nice things happen to Bob.

This is a key installment of The Laundry Files. Events that take place here have repercussions deep into the series. They change Bob's life (and that of his wife Mo O'Brien) completely in Book 5, The Rhesus Chart. And much later, in Book 8 The Delirium Brief, the things here described change the world.

Also, I cannot resist mentioning an Easter Egg. We learn in The Fuller Memorandum that in the early twentieth century Angleton was a mathematics tutor at Sherborne School. Sherborne is the public school attended by mathematical genius Alan Turing. In the real world, Turing created the underpinning for computer science, and also led the successful effort to break German codes in World War II. In the fictional world of The Laundry Files he was also responsible for the "Turing Theorems", which form the basis of computational demonology". It is, to my mind, beyond doubt that Angleton propelled fictional Turing on his career.

The Fuller Memorandum is one of the best novels in The Laundry Files. Gideon Emery does his usual excellent job of narrating the audiobook, handling diverse accents with aplomb. (No Americans in this one, but lots of Russians, not to mention English accents of varying fruitiness.) It is not only an entertaining novel -- it is also crucial to the continuity of the entire series.

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