Leo Marks (1920–2001)

A fantastic, humorous, very well-written memoir by Britain's top codemaker and Director of Communications for SOE during WWII. At age 23 Marks leaves home hoping to do his bit for his country. While everyone else in his cryptographic class heads off for Bletchley Park, Leo ends up on Baker Street with the SEO. He becomes the head of code making for the British. His story is honest, self-deprecating, and funny. But he never forgets the agents lost, especially Violette Szabo and Yeo-Thomas. show more The title refers to a conversation Marks had to convince the purse-string holders to produce his codes on strips of silk. He says the agents lives may very well come down to his silks, or cyanide. Highly recommended. (Read and reviewed in 2017) show less

I absolutely loved this book. The personal story of a British codemaker in World War 2, this vivid diary is extremely entertaining. The author provides lots of information and thinking around the making and breaking of codes -- if you are a "puzzle person" as am I, these parts in particular will be riveting. At times quite honest, at times self serving, it's a great read that leaves you with a twinkle in your eye.

Last night I finished my third reading of Between Silk & Cyanide. I was up to the wee hours finishing it up; it is a very hard book to put down. This is the kind of book that you almost regret finishing.

Leo Marks was a cryptographer with the British Special Operations Executive during World War II; this book chronicles his experiences during that time. It reads like a James Bond novel, and is made all the more fascinating by the fact that it is non-fiction. Leo Marks was a superior show more cryptographer. He became head of communications at SOE, where he ultimately transformed code-making techniques, and trained many of the most famous agents of the time in their use.

While I didn't know it on my first reading of this book, Leo Marks was also a playwright, albeit largely unknown. He brings to his autobiography a narrative style that is at times self-effacing and humorous, and at others wrenching in the depths of the emotion it conveys.

Here, take this excerpt:

"For a short while the whole class seemed to be moving in orderly mental convoy towards the promised land of Bletchley. But amongst those potential problem-masters there was one confirmed problem-pupil. I knew that if I didn't break behaviour patterns as well as codes, I would be lucky to last the term - a prospect which made me keep peace with my teachers for a personal best of about a week. The regression started when I felt a code of my own simmering inside me. This unwanted pregnancy was accompanied by morning sickness which took the form of questioning the quality of the exercises which were supposed to extend us. I was convinced that the school's methods of teaching would be better suited to a crash course in accountancy. The decline was irreversible..."

Hard to believe the man found little success as a playwright, but, then, screenplays are not a medium well-suited to prose. He should have become a novelist.

The first time I read Between Silk & Cyanide, I had no idea what a significant impact its author, Leo Marks, had made. In his book he is self-effacing to the extreme, poking fun at SOE, his superiors within that organization, and most especially himself. So it was not until after my first reading of the book, when curiosity led me to Google him, that I realized that he single-handedly changed the way the British managed their codes and the agents using them in World War II.

It reads like the plot of a Jack Higgins novel. This book has everything you’d expect to find in a novel. It has intrigue, excitement, adventure. But it packs an emotional punch that is wholly unexpected.

At the beginning of the book, Leo Marks is young. Impulsive, impetuous, brash, and convinced of his own correctness. At the end, he's still young in years; this book covers a span of only a handful of years, so the author was entering his mid-twenties when the war ended. Still impulsive and impetuous (though more inclined to spare at least a moment's thought to something stupid before he actually does it), he is also tired. The kind of bone-deep weariness that comes from life's more difficult experiences, rather than from physical labor. And he's disgusted and a little angry, after so long a time trying to work around politics and infighting in his efforts to keep agents alive.

During the war, he fell in love for the first time, and lost that love. His best friend, Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas, an SOE agent, is captured by the Nazis and tortured, and returns from captivity at the end of the war an old man in a young man's skin. Aside - Tommy's Google entry doesn't do him justice, but check it out anyway. He was a true-blue hero.

The author learned to love codes at the age of 8 in his father's book store, 84 Charing Cross Road (yes, that 84 Charing Cross Road). He loved puzzles and codes. But at the end of the war he walked away from them without a backward glance. But the war, such a small fraction of his life in years, obviously left an indelible impression, and nearly forty years later, he wrote this book. At the time, some of what he described was still so sensitive that it was not until 1998 that the British government allowed it to be published. Fortunate for us that they finally did.

I read a lot of history. In particular (though not exclusively), a lot of military history. This book is one of the finest examples of the genre I have ever had the pleasure of reading. The excerpts I've shared with you can give only a glimmer of the true impact of this book; it has to be read to be fully experienced, and it is an experience well worth the time. I haven't done it justice; it is impossible to do so. I hope you'll read the book and see for yourself. show less

I admit that all the jargon about codemaking and codebreaking went over my head, but Marks's self-deprecating humor and engaging writing style kept me going so I finished the whole book in just two sittings in less than 24 hours. People who like World War II books will love this -- it's thrilling and suspenseful but without the violence. I did not envy the coders, and even less so the field agents, and I admired Marks for kicking and screaming and agitating so much to try to make their lives show more easier (and longer).

Bonus: I wrote an Executed Today entry for Noor Inayat Khan, one of the more memorable characters I first encountered in Between Silk and Cyanide. show less