Double Agent #1
Web of Danger by Aaron Allston
Acolytes of Darkness by Flint Dille and David Marconi
1988 TSR
Top Secret was TSR's contemporary espionage role-playing game, originating in 1980. The system was updated in 1987 with Top Secret/S.I., which had a variety of game settings, which in turn had tie-in novels.
Web of Danger is similar to The Man From UNCLE. The good guys work for ORION, an extra-governmental espionage agency, who fight the bad guys, the Web. The plot: the web has a knockout gas, which they plan to use on an attack on the New York Stock Exchange, which in turn is cover for spreading a computer virus into the world's financial computer systems.
The novel has the feel of an RPG campaign, with different characters having different specialties, and you can almost feel the rolling dice as they attempt different tasks.
Acolytes of Darkness is set in the 1930s and is pure pulp homage, with beats lifted from the Shadow and the Spider. Agent 13 is a former member of the Brotherhood, which is led by the sinister Hand Sinister. The Brotherhood is functionally a yellow menace threat, but it also incorporates ancient South American priesthoods and European monks. There is a supernatural element, with formulas for eternal life and a vampire.
While Web of Danger had the feel of a fictionalized rpg session, Acolytes of Darkness was more of a series of scenes stitched together.
There are two more Double Agent novel collections with different writers, and at least a couple more standalone Agent 13 novels.
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