The cover of my copy of The Secret Agent shows an illustration of turn-of-the-century London at twilight in winter with lights just beginning to show on the buildings and bridges and skeletal trees black against the grey winter sky. This is a story wrapped in the cold fog of a winter’s day, with all its gloom and mystery, deep in the dark streets of late-Victorian London.

Published in 1906, but set twenty years earlier, with most of Europe in fear – real or imagined – of socialists, anarchists, Russians, Germans, Jews and countless others, we see trouble lurking around every corner and trust no one. This was a time when assassination attempts were made on the French President, and – successfully – the Russian Tsar, and bombs were exploded in capital cities, including London, and Conrad brings his own brand of journalistically observed fiction to these issues.

The Victorian London that Conrad paints so vividly feels astonishingly familiar and contemporary: A Conservative government justifying its new Aliens Bill, extremist groups placing agent provocateurs among the population and suicide bombers controlled by shady puppeteers. The Secret Agent is a brutal depiction of the absurdities and futilities of people and the deceitful institutions that some serve. It is often comic and always thought provoking.

However the true tragedy of this story lies at its core, with the domestic drama that is the family life of the protagonist, Mr Verloc, the secret agent of the title and self-proclaimed anarchist. When the façade of his marriage is torn asunder by a shockingly violent act, he and his family are altered for good, and the true nature of his “business” comes home to roost. Throughout Conrad successfully juggles the various threads of his story, managing to say as much about the human condition as he does world politics and the brainless violence of conflict.

Despite once in a while slipping into one too many Victorianisms for this reader, Conrad really gets into the heads of his subjects and manages the enviable task of creating each one equally as sad, familiar, attractive and, ultimately, human as one another, independent of which side of the blurred legal line they sit on. He ratchets up the tension when necessary and twists the story to keep the reader on the edge of his seat, cumulating in a climax I didn’t see coming. Conrad also has created a really strong female character, Winnie Verloc, a rarity for a male author of those times.

The Secret Agent is an interesting and compelling read, a real page-turner that demonstrates good characterization, plotting and old-fashioned story-telling and feels both of its time and timeless simultaneously. It is probably not Conrad’s best book, but it’s at least as good as many by his contemporaries that are regarded as classics. And beyond that, The Secret Agent blazed a trail for the copious spy, thriller and crime novels that would become ubiquitous during the following century.