The Amateur

The Amateur (1981) is the first novel by prominent espionage thriller author Robert Littell, most famous for his later novel, The Company (2002). The Amateur follows a mild-mannered CIA cryptographer in the early 1970s who takes matters into his own hands when the Agency refuses to track down the terrorists who killed his fiancée. Relying on his need for revenge, the skills he has hastily cobbled together in a CIA boot camp, and his love of patterns and codes, the cryptographer turns his amateur status into an asset. The novel went out of publication soon after its release—after initial reviews decried, in the words of Stephen Zoller writing for Cinema Canada, “a plot that resembles Swiss cheese, with holes big enough for all those shiny Mercedes Benz production cars to drive through”—but was reissued once Littell became famous.

Our protagonist is Charlie Heller, one of the best cryptographers at the CIA. Recruited after he published an essay in the Kenyon Review about patterns in the work of 18th-century diarist Samuel Pepys, Charlie now has Top Secret clearance status and spends his days breaking KGB ciphers and bantering with his coworker, a Russian crate expert. Quiet, scholarly, and not qualified for fieldwork, Charlie is happy in his back-office position. Outside of work, Charlie has two passions: his fiancée, Sarah Diamond, a globetrotting photographer, and his obsessive conviction that somewhere inside Shakespeare’s works is a cryptogram that will reveal their true author.

Sarah is taken hostage during a terrorist attack on a US Embassy in Germany. To secure their victory, the terrorists decide to execute a hostage. To spare the lives of others, Sarah volunteers that she is Jewish, prompting the attackers to murder her.



Charlie’s life is turned upside down with grief and mourning. At the funeral, he has an eye-opening conversation with Sarah’s father, a Holocaust concentration camp survivor who tells him that the only way he managed to overcome at least some of his trauma was through revenge. Killing a Nazi doctor when the camp was liberated, Sarah’s father says, “brought me back from the dead!” The CIA therapist Charlie is sent to see also agrees that vengeance has “therapeutic” properties.

Charlie demands that the CIA mount an operation to find and catch the three terrorists responsible. However, because they have crossed into Czechoslovakia, the killers are behind the Iron Curtain and thus unreachable by the US—legally, the only thing to do is wait for them to emerge.

Frustrated and furious, Charlie formulates a different plan—one where he, and not trained field agents, will be the one to go after the bad guys. Because of his security clearance, Charlie has access to lots of incriminating materials about CIA operations over the years. Choosing 25 or so of the worst ones, he stores them as encrypted files on his computer and uses them to blackmail the Agency. If they train him to find and overcome the terrorists himself, he will attempt to do so and will deny CIA involvement if caught. If they deny him, he will release the damning information he has squirreled away to the public.



The CIA agrees, and Charlie undergoes a rigorous, but sped up training course at “the Farm,” a special spy school. There, he gets to up his banter game with a disapproving but encouraging master spy instructor.

Finally, Charlie embarks on his mission. What he doesn’t know is that the CIA planted the original terrorists—led by a double agent whose covert status is so valuable that the CIA now wants to take Charlie out before he can unmask the whole operation. So, while Charlie makes his way through Czechoslovakia, he is being pursued by a consummate assassin sent by the Agency to take him out.

Aided by plot-breaking amounts of luck and coincidence, Charlie evades the assassin by virtue of being such an amateur at the spy game: He simply doesn’t know enough to follow Agency procedures, thus foiling the assassin’s plots and schemes.



When Charlie gets a lead that one of the terrorists involved, Gretchen, is the lover of a KGB agent, he puts himself into greater danger. Now, not only is the CIA assassin hot on his trail, but so are the KGB (tipped off by the CIA) and Czech authorities (because he doesn’t legally have authority to be there). The only person on Charlie’s side is former CIA agent Elizabeth, whose Czech poet husband was killed by KGB goons and who fills Charlie in on the cultural destruction wrought by Communism. As they work together, they develop romantic feelings for each other.

With Elizabeth’s help, Charlie finds and kills two of the terrorists: Gretchen and Joan Antonio. The climax of the novel is Charlie’s confrontation with the embassy attack’s mastermind Horst, a psychotic killer whose allegiances are extremely complex. He is a CIA agent whose role as a double agent for the KGB makes it unclear which side of the Cold War he is on. Moreover, Horst is the son of a man who used to be an informer for the Gestapo, explaining why the terrorists would target a Jewish hostage first.

The novel ends on a victorious note. Charlie kills Horst, finds love with Elizabeth, and in his downtime has managed to solve the mystery of Shakespeare’s authorship—it turns out it was Francis Bacon all along.