On His Majesty's Secret Service. Sidney Reilly, Codename ST1

First edition, first impression. SIGNED AND DATED BY THE AUTHOR, IN BLUE PEN, ON TOP FFEP 'Andrew Cook Feb. 2003'. Some slight edge and bumping to corners, some very slight fingerprint soiling to covers, previous owner's address sticker to ffep, internally clean tight and square, spine uncreased, no other inscriptions, price on back cover (£14.99), overall a vg+ copy, looks hardly read. 288pp, illustrated. The life and adventures of the real life 1920s British secret service agent Sidney George Reilly (1873-1925), a Russian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard's Special Branch and later by the Foreign Section of the British Secret Service Bureau, the precursor to the modern British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6/SIS). He is alleged to have spied for at least four different great powers, and documentary evidence indicates that he was involved in espionage activities in 1890s London among Russian emigre circles, in Manchuria on the eve of the Russo Japanese War (1904–05), and in an abortive 1918 coup d'etat against Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik government in Moscow. Reilly disappeared in Soviet Russia in the mid 1920s, and British diplomat and journalist R.H. Bruce Lockhart publicised their 1918 operation to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. Lockhart's 1932 book 'Memoirs of a British Agent' became an international bestseller and garnered global fame for Reilly. The memoirs retold the efforts by Reilly, Lockhart, and other conspirators to sabotage the Bolshevik revolution while still in its infancy. The world's press made Reilly into a household name within five years of his execution by Soviet agents in 1925, lauding him as a peerless spy and recounting his many espionage adventures. Newspapers dubbed him 'the greatest spy in history' and 'the Scarlet Pimpernel of Red Russia'. The London Evening Standard described his exploits in an illustrated serial in May 1931 headlined 'Master Spy'. he is supposedly the inspiration for Ian Fleming's 007. This new biography is based on the author's privileged access to over 200 closed MI6 documents. Please note, jacket illustration different from Abe stock photo. Very scarce signed.…