Publishing is a weird business.

A few years ago, if someone had told a publisher: “I’ve got the next great idea: books involving religion, art analysis, old books, and scholars,” I don’t know, but maybe everyone wouldn’t have got all that pumped up.

Now, of course, since Dan Brown wrote “The Da Vinci Code,” editors everywhere are looking for similar books so that they, too, can sell 25 million copies. As if it works that way.

Unless you are a publishing insider, you probably never heard of Peter Mayer. In addition to other big jobs, Mr. Mayer ran Viking/Penguin for many years, bringing it the same sort of success he previously had achieved at other large houses. This is not surprising, perhaps, because he is a very smart man – though maybe not that smart, or else why would he go into publishing in the first place?

That’s a joke. Virtually everyone you’d want to know in the publishing world is there for the same reason: a love of books. Sure, you can make a lot more money selling hamburgers or DVD players, and the hours are better, but it somehow lacks the depth, the joy, the sense of importance of making books. Nothing wrong with burgers (I love ’em) or DVD players (I finally figured out how to use one), but publishing, it seems to me, offers a kind of fulfillment that compensates for the long hours and lousy pay.

Peter Mayer obviously feels the same way. When he neared retirement age, he resigned his position at Viking/Penguin. Not to go play golf or atrophy under a palm tree, but to work for the little company he had

started years ago as a lark, the Overlook Press. Within a couple of years, he expanded the company by many multiples and, although he attempts a balanced list, he’s found a little specialty.

The fact that that specialty happened to be a genre long regarded as all but dead, espionage fiction, did not bother him. He liked it, and that’s all that matters when you run your own house.

His first major leap into spy stories was “The Company” by Robert Littell. This 900-page blockbuster was given a courageous 35,000-copy first printing. This may not sound like much, but Mr. Littell, in spite of being among a handful of greatest espionage novelists of all time, had never had a truly successful book in terms of sales.

Critical acclaim was great, sales moved along nicely, and Mr. Mayer did something virtually unknown in contemporary publishing: He began to reissue all of Mr. Littell’s spy books in hardcover.

At the same time, Mr. Mayer persuaded the great Charles McCarry to write another thriller, which he did. “Old Boys,” too, became a terrific success (as well as one of five finalists for the Los Angeles Times award for best mystery of the year). Again Overlook, showing the kind of support authors dream about but rarely receive, is reissuing the early masterpieces by Mr. McCarry, beginning with his only best seller, “The Tears of Autumn,” which may be the best spy novel ever written by an American.

Now, happily for those of us who love the intricacy, deceit, subtlety, complexity, and worldliness that the best espionage fiction embraces, Mr. Littell has produced a new thriller, one that will win him even more new fans than his previous book did.

The hero of “Legends” (Overlook, 395 pages, $25.95) – and it’s usually risky to regard the protagonist of a spy story as a hero, because he almost inevitably engages in non-heroic behavior from time to time – has such a complex story to tell that even he is confused some of the time.

Martin Odum is a former field agent for the CIA who now has a quiet, little private-eye practice in Brooklyn. He helps collect mah-jongg debts, catches cheating spouses on camera, and keeps an eye out on behalf of Chasidic fathers who fear their sons may be dating girls who don’t keep kosher.

When a local woman asks him to help find a man who ran out on his sister shortly after marrying her, he declines – until his former boss in the

CIA tells him to lay off the case. As he pursues the near phantom, he encounters again some of the people he knew in that dangerous previous life.

They did not always know him as Martin Odum. He had other identities, known as “legends,” each of which required different skills, even different personalities. He sometimes was Dante Pippen, an IRA explosives expert. Other times he was Lincoln Dittmann, whose passion was the American Civil War. Each legend had a unique history, provided to him by the CIA.

Odum speaks different languages, in different accents, frequently shifting from one persona to another so quickly and smoothly that he cannot always remember who he is supposed to be. When someone asks if Martin Odum is his real name, if he is the actual person, he is told that that is who he is. That is the first legend. But if a legend is made up, created by others, who is the person who learned that legend?

As Odum chases the missing husband around the world, he discovers that he is one of the richest and most dangerous men alive. Common sense tells him to cease the pursuit, and he is told the same thing by his former bosses, who are afraid he will succeed and, for their own reasons, don’t want him to. Yet he stubbornly persists, arriving at a satisfying, if unpredictable, conclusion.

With a plot that has more curves than Pamela Anderson and more tension than the waiting room at a gastroenterologist’s, “Legends” solidifies Mr. Littell’s position among the pantheon of great espionage writers.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories”. He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.