The Sandbaggers: This BBC series will put you to sleep if you can't handle talking heads because it had zero budget back in the late 70s/early 80s when they did it. But if you can deal with that, it's one of the best old-school espionage tv shows ever. Lots of opportunities for people to be unbelievable bastards to one another and characters get greased at the drop of a hat. The body count isn't huge, but you never know when an agent might not come back from a mission (one person's end in East Germany is very grim indeed). Roy Marsden is great as Neil Burnside, the 'hero' if this show had one.

'The Silver John series' by Manly Wade Wellman: An acquired taste, but if you like this sort of thing, you'll really love it. John is a wandering minstrel in the hills of Appalachia, running into all kinds of very American (or sometimes European transplanted) strangeness. Some of the stories misfire, and the novels Wellman wrote later aren't as good, but there are collections of the original short stories in used bookstores, and they're definitely worth a look.