The Cold Dark Night

The Cold Dark Night is a 1957 spy thriller novel by the British writer Sarah Gainham.^[1] Her second novel, it is set at the height of the Cold War when the 1954 Berlin Conference saw the Big Four foreign ministers arrive in the divided city.^[2] Gainham had worked in Berlin as a journalist at the time of the Conference.

Joe Purdey, an American journalist in Berlin to cover the conference encounters Gisela Schill, a refugee from East Germany whose husband has gone missing while working for British intelligence behind the Iron Curtain. He is drawn into the world of subterfuge and low-level spying taking place in the city. The novel concludes with a face-off between British and Soviet forces at the Anhalter Bahnhof, a ruined railway terminus on the border between the two zones.

• Burton, Alan. Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
• Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015.