Venetian Blind (novel)

Venetian Blind is a 1959 suspense novel by the British author William Haggard published in England by Cassell and in the United States by Ives Washburn. It was Haggard's second of 21 books involving his urbane protagonist Colonel Charles Russell, the head of the unobtrusive but lethal Security Executive, a government counter-intelligence agency clearly based on the actual MI5 or Security Service, where he moves easily and gracefully along C.P. Snow's Corridors of Power in Whitehall. Like all of Haggard's books it has standard elements of suspense thrillers but in addition there is an almost Henry Jamiesian exposition of British establishment mores and character, in both the government and in the world of upper-class financiers, scientists, industrialists, their families, and hangers-on, making it very much a novel of character.