Terrorists with roadside bombs have the world’s attention at the moment, but once upon a time a different breed of killer stalked the earth. It wasn’t so long ago, and for those who remember the strange death of the Bulgarian writer Georgi Ivanov Markov in 1978, revisiting of the case on “Secrets of the Dead” series will tickle some brain cells. For those new to the tale, the episode, titled “Umbrella Assassin,” will be even more compelling. It turns out that those James Bond movies were not fiction after all. Mr. Markov wrote novels and plays that displeased the hard-line Communist president of Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, and in 1969 he defected to the West, eventually ending up in England doing commentary for the BBC and Radio Free Europe.
