Espionage Aficionados discussion

I just finished re-reading "The Summer Soldier" by Nicholas Guild, and wondered if anyone else here had read it.

This novel is basically a tale of one predator hunting another, but the character depth and moral ambiguities make it more analogous with Le Carre or Greene than with simple action-thrillers. This is Guild's first novel about professional killer Ray Guinness. There are at least a couple more, and I will track those down soon.

As an aside, I took a fiction writing course my freshman year at The Ohio State University, and Guild was the instructor. The first day of class, we probably had 30 students. Guild spent the first day telling us how God-damned hard it was to break into the fiction writing business, and how most of us probably were nowhere near good enough to get published.

The next class session, we had maybe seven or eight students. Most of the students had been scared away. Guild told us that now that we had pared the class down to a workable size, we would meet for classes in a comfortable lounge, dissecting one another's stories. He was very intense as a teacher, but very insightful. It was the best class I took at OSU.