Although little remembered even in his British homeland, the remarkable Geoffrey Pyke attracted much attention in the 1930s and ‘40s. Sometimes it was the wrong sort of attention. MI5 suspected him of being a Soviet spy, although Henry Hemming’s insists in his new biography that Pyke was never a professional agent but may have casually passed a few tips to close friends in the Communist Party. Pyke was a raging eccentric who believed that the maddest schemes were best. He played the stock market like a concertmaster, made scientific discoveries even though he was no scientist, invented things (including a prototype for the pedal pubs that tool around today’s cities), helped conceive commando raids against Nazi-occupied Europe and made many ahead-of-his-times suggestions that were later adopted. When he took his own life at age 54, Time magazine called it “the only unoriginal thing he had ever done.”
