James Bond aside, the British take their...

James Bond aside, the British take their spies very seriously.

The revelations concerning Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt did more than dominate London headlines in the 1950s and 1960s. The defections to Moscow of these double agents who rose out of the privileged classes rocked the British imagination. John le Carre based some of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” on the story of Kim Philby. The film, “Another Country,” examined how it was that staunchly English institutions such as the public school (and Cambridge) could nurture future double agents for the Soviets.

Spy fiction coming out of the United Kingdom has a grim, urgent edge to it that reflects the British sense of having been at the front lines in the Cold War. Brits have always seen themselves as a step ahead of the noisy, Commie-bashing Americans in the age-old war with the KGB.

Of course, glasnost and the collapse of the Communist regimes in East Germany and Eastern Europe have actually dated most recent spy fiction, whether American or British.

Leave it to Len Deighton, then, to come in right under the wire.

Next to Le Carre (or alongside, if you will), Deighton has been a master of British spy fiction since he published “Funeral in Berlin” and “The Ipcress File.”

His newest novel, Spy Sinker (Harper & Row: $19.95; 352 pp., 250,000-copy first printing), is the final volume in a trilogy, preceded by “Spy Hook” and “Spy Line.” Deighton promises that each of these three novels concerning the Bernard Samson story may be read in any order and that each functions independently of the other.

In “Spy Sinker” Deighton tells the story of how British Intelligence, back in the late ‘70s, wants to plant a double agent in East Germany whose mission will be to start the machinery for the dismantling of the Wall in 1988. Fiona Samson, a career spy and wife of intelligence officer Bernard Samson, is picked for the job. She is to defect and her husband is not to know that her defection is entirely staged. It will appear that this glamorous lady has simply left behind husband, children (and hairdresser), a nice London flat, maybe a Jag, and moved by choice to dreary, dull East Berlin out of pure desire to serve the Socialists.

I was completedly fascinated by the idea that it was the British behind the recent changes in Germany--infiltrating religious groups, undermining the economy, generating the unrest that lead to the recent demonstrations by the rosy-cheeked Junge Ostberliner , all leading to the bringing down of the Wall.

We learn just a little about Bernard and Fiona’s less-than-cozy marriage. We wait anxiously, along with Fiona, for the orders to go East. We want to see her get out of the assignment. But her superior, Bret Rensselaer, refuses to take her personal needs into account. He browbeats her into accepting the next to impossible task of defecting for her country.

The novel quietly builds to the point where the British must spring Fiona out of the East.

Why is Fiona’s sister Tessa in Berlin at the crucial time? Who is the guy in the gorilla suit? Why does Deighton introduce the subplot about Rensselaer’s wife leaving him? What went on during that meeting between Fiona and Bernard that London Central didn’t know about?

I missed that crucial scene in “Spy Sinker”--when the long separated husband and wife finally meet face to face. Will I find it in “Spy Hook” or “Spy Line”? Fiona’s story takes center stage here, thus putting Bernard’s into the background. His version of events is picked up in other Deighton novels.

As it stands on its own, “Spy Sinker” is a cold, spare tale of a woman we never get close to. Fiona and Bernard remain particularly bureaucratic and faceless. Their bosses, in contrast--American Anglophile Bret Rensselaer, and the agency director Sir Henry Clevemore--come across as lively and utterly ruthless, no less so than any KGB operative.

Deighton hooks you, though. I’m curious to read more about Bernard and Fiona in his other books to round their story. I also want to find out more about their boss Bret, why he’s given up spying for living the easy life in Ventura, Calif.

Thomas Tryon’s new novel, The Wings of Morning (Alfred A. Knopf: $22.95; 568 pp.) is about as removed in time and spirit from Southern California as you can imagine. We’re back in small-town 19th-Century New England. And I thought East Berlin was dull.

Tryon, the author of such best-sellers as “The Other” and “Harvest Home,” has written an oddly archaic book. Tryon has carefully constructed an outsized Victorian- style story complete with level-headed heroine and uplifting moral message. Even the titles in the Contents sound as if they should be inscribed on parchment: “The Stag at Morn”; “The Miller Makes Ado”; “When Lilies Bloomed in the Snow.”

Georgie Ross is the daughter of a poor miller in an agrarian New England village. Two local, affluent families, the Grimeses and the Talcotts, carry on a multigenerational feud. Georgie is buddies with the young scion, “Sinjin” Grimes, while at the same time she works as a domestic for the Talcotts and their numerous daughters.

The plot opens like a New England version of “Romeo and Juliet”: Sinjin meets the beautiful but empty-headed Aurora Talcott the day the town is preparing to welcome President John Quincy Adams. Georgie plays the role of go-between, which leads to no good. She loses her job, Aurora ups and marries an English aristocrat and Sinjin sails off to China on the ship that his grandmother gives him.

Georgie is the most plucky, rational (read boring ) heroine to come down the pike since Agnes in “David Copperfield.” Endurance is this girl’s middle name. She says to her father, a villain and creep if there ever was one: “Life’s not sad, at least it oughtn’t to be. It should be happy and joyous.”

This from a girl whom nobody ever comes round to court. (She may be no beauty, but you get the idea she’s a comely lass.) She briefly entertains romantic notions about Sinjin, an immature 19-year-old with a Byron complex, but quickly sees the silliness in it. She’s hired as local teacher but then soon is fired for teaching “far too much Byron.” She is reduced to working as a serving girl in a public house, but turns that grinding job into a cheerful and honorable existence. She’s offered a chance to travel to Italy but turns it down, preferring to remain in this backwater community. Does she have any idea what she’s doing to the reader?

Georgie carries on, always rational, always seeing everything in its proper perspective. So much so that it starts to drive you crazy. You want her to fall madly in love, have a temper tantrum, anything .

Georgie’s dog is killed in a dog fight and a violent tragedy strikes her family (it is a horrible thing that happens, yet the only riveting event in this entire novel). Only then does she humanly respond to the grimness around her: “And all was kept within her, the pain and horror she took into herself and kept close, as though to make friends of them.”

Tryon has built a terribly thin story on a massive scale. The real problem here isn’t Tryon’s ability to tell a tale, but his choice of characters. Sinjin, Aurora and Georgie are too immature to be interesting and to have anything to talk about. They’re just teen-agers, not exactly the most evolved species on the planet.

And sometimes Tryon is hilarious without intending to be: “ ‘Having shuffled off this mortal coil, old Percy’s in a far better way than I am.’ As he always did when alluding to the romantic Shelley, Sinjin spoke feelingly of the poet’s tragic death.”

If you go for pages of party preparations and discussions about hat design, lots of empty chitchat and bad poetry quoted at length, this book is for you.

Tryon’s choice of information to share borders on the sexist. He gives us details about the Grimes’ bad taste in home decorating: “A pineapple motif . . . badly faded.” At the same time he throws in some intriguing tidbits about the political rivalry of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He even gives his feuding characters political opinions. But he never elaborates on any of these references. Could he believe that the distaff side of things simply precludes an interest in history and politics?

On the other hand, both politics and interior decorating take a definite back seat in the new Sidney Sheldon novel, Memories of Midnight (William Morrow: $21.95; 399 pp.). Financial wheeling and dealing and hired killers are the stuff of this somewhat bland sequel to “The Other Side of Midnight,” the highly likable story of the doomed beautiful gamine Noelle Paige and her evil Greek lover, Constantin Demiris.

Guys don’t come much worse than Demiris. He has to have more money than anybody else. He has to have any woman he fancies. He hires people to kill whoever gets in his way or makes him look like a jerk. He lives for revenge the way I live for a vacation in the south of France.

At the end of “The Other Side of Midnight,” Demiris had his mistress Noelle and her American lover Larry executed, even though they were actually innocent of killing Larry’s wife Catherine. It is a year later in “Memories” when we meet Catherine, just emerging from amnesia. Demiris has counted on the American woman never regaining her memory, since he’s made sure the world (or most of it) thinks she is dead.

So Demiris decides Catherine must die, but first, like a cat, he’ll have his fun with her.

A major weakness in Sheldon’s story is that we are expected to believe that Catherine has no distant relative, no friend, besides her ex-boss, that she’d want to contact to tell she’s alive.

The plot is uninspired, even cartoony, and somewhat predictable. I knew there had to be a point in mentioning a boiler in the basement of Catherine’s London office, and a reason for Wim, the idiot savant, to be present. There are no accidents, no wasted references in Sheldon’s world. Still, he does manage a couple of neat surprises.

And as for sex, Sheldon gets right to it on the third page when Demiris visits The Blue House in Hong Kong, a “cornucopia of forbidden pleasures,” where he orders twins. Sheldon certainly had me curious, for the rest of the novel, about what exactly is the “tenth century art of Ishinpo”?

Anyone have an idea? I’d hate for a creep like Demiris to be able to take a secret like that to his grave.