Agent Zigzag
Ben Macintyre
Bloomsbury £14.99, pp372

Eddie Chapman was a king of the underworld. The head of a 'jelly gang', he blew up safes with stolen gelignite, counted Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich among his friends and had a taste for 'the world of pimps and racecourse touts, pickpockets and con artists; late nights at Smokey Joe's and early champagne breakfasts at Quaglino's'. Women found him irresistible. Then came the Second World War and, as Europe fell dark, wrong became right. Chapman became a brilliant spy, a double agent and a saboteur. Women still found him irresistible. Agent Zigzag is his story.

Ben Macintyre tells Chapman's tale in a perfect pitch: with the Boys' Own thrills of Rider Haggard, the verve of George MacDonald Fraser and Carl Hiaasen's mordant humour. The author of books on Josiah Harlan, 'the man who would be king', and Adam Worth, 'the real Moriarty', Macintyre has an eye for the adventure tale revisited.

Although Chapman has long been recognised as one of Britain's most successful double agents, his full story has only recently been revealed with the opening of the files at the National Archive. Macintyre seems to have rustled through them with great happiness. Revelling in a meeting between 'a highly trained scientist and an equally well trained burglar', he quotes Lord Rothschild, then the head of MI5's explosives and sabotage section: 'We were just saying that we two would rather like to do a little show together - blow something up.'

Chapman's early life of safe-cracking and cognac came to an end when he was caught on Jersey. He had to leave a woman (who wasn't his wife) by jumping through a hotel window and legging it along the beach. That night he blew a safe to raise funds for his escape but was betrayed by a boarding-room landlady. The local crime meant he was stuffing mattresses in a Jersey gaol when the Germans invaded in 1940. 'Adventure to Chapman is the breath of life,' wrote 'Tin Eye' Stephens, one of his subsequent British handlers. 'Given adventure, he has the courage to achieve the unbelievable.' Indeed. From Jersey, Chapman offered his services to the Abwehr, the German secret service. By the time his letter reached the right people, he had been carted off to Romainville in Paris, a concentration camp where death arrived with more regularity than food. When the Abwehr's agent turned up, Chapman was in solitary, keeping warm by burying himself up to the neck in gravel.

Macintyre, who came to the story while reading Chapman's obituary, never misses a delightful, haunting or terrifying detail. The British were aware of Germany's increasing hopes for Chapman through the broken Enigma codes. They listened as he was taught to broadcast, trying to work out what he meant when he tapped out, 'Bobby the pig now gorges like a king, roars like a lion, and shits like an elephant.' Chapman really had found himself a pet pig.

Eventually the secret agent was given a mission, to blow up a factory in Hendon, which produced the de Havilland Mosquito. As soon as he parachuted into a celery field in Cambridgeshire he gave himself up by knocking at a farmhouse door and asking the farmer to call the police. From here, Macintyre introduces us to those who ran Britain's spy network. Chapman turned, as he seems to have always intended, into a double agent. He already had an illegitimate child in Britain whom he was desperately keen to see. The Abwehr had created a monster for itself. From here, Chapman's adventures continued, through Portugal, Germany and into Norway, Macintyre opening up a world that is perennially fascinating.

The story is so good that others have spotted it too. Pity, for a moment, poor Nicholas Booth. His Zigzag is also published this week ( Portrait pounds 12.99 ), with the same colour of cover, many of the same pictures and almost the same opening: 'A ghostly darkness extended far across the fenlands of Cambridgeshire in the early hours of a surprisingly clement December morning.' In contrast, Ben Macintyre writes: 'A German spy drops from a black Focke-Wulf reconnaissance plane over Cambridgeshire.' I feel for Booth because while I have a fondness for the poetic, it's not what Chapman's story needs. Macintyre's Agent Zigzag is by no means soaring literature, but it is hugely engaging. Buy it for dads everywhere, but read it too.