The Broken Penny (1953)

The Broken Penny is a thriller, first published in 1953, written by George Orwell’s friend Julian Symons. The action hero is based on Orwell.

The story is predicated on an attempt to return a liberal government to a Soviet bloc satellite. It was written too early to discover that such efforts in real life, in Albania for instance, were being sabotaged by agents within the Allied services, and no attempts succeeded.